What was the first digital scale?
Weighing scale
The balance (also balance scale, beam balance and laboratory balance) was the first mass measuring instrument invented. In its traditional form, it consists of a pivoted horizontal lever with arms of equal lengththe beamand a weighing pan suspended from each arm (hence the plural name ""scales" for a weighing instrument). The unknown mass is placed in one pan and standard masses are added to the other pan until the beam is as close to equilibrium as possible. In precision balances, a more accurate determination of the mass is given by the position of a sliding mass moved along a graduated scale. Technically, a balance compares weight rather than mass, but, in a given gravitational field (such as Earth's gravity), the weight of an object is proportional to its mass, so the standard masses used with balances are usually labeled in units of mass (e.g. g or kg).
Davide Carbone
In 2017 Carbone as Carbon Electra released the 'Mussenden EP' on Intec Digital, and as FSOM released 'The 90's Anthology' album featuring tracks never before available online. Carbone also released the music software plugin 'Scaler' to worldwide critical acclaim as the first piece of software that analyses musical performances and notation in order to detect the scale and key and suggest alternate scales, chord voicings and chord progressions. Scaler received several positive reviews in major magazines and webzines including 9/10 in Computer Music, 4.7/5 at Rekkerd and a Music Tech Magazine ‘Editors Choice Award’.
Level staff
Digital levels electronically read a bar-coded scale on the staff. These instruments usually include data recording capability. The automation removes the requirement for the operator to read a scale and write down the value, and so reduces blunders. It may also compute and apply refraction and curvature corrections.
Weighing scale
Most countries regulate the design and servicing of scales used for commerce. This has tended to cause scale technology to lag behind other technologies because expensive regulatory hurdles are involved in introducing new designs. Nevertheless, there has been a trend to "digital load cells" which are actually strain-gauge cells with dedicated analog converters and networking built into the cell itself. Such designs have reduced the service problems inherent with combining and transmitting a number of 20 millivolt signals in hostile environments.
Counts per minute
An instrument which totalises the events detected over a time period is known as a scaler. This colloquial name comes from the early days of automatic radiation counting, when a pulse-dividing circuit was required to "scale down" a high count rate to a speed which mechanical counters could register. This technique was developed by C E Wynn-Williams at The Cavendish Laboratory and first published in 1932. The original counters used a cascade of "Eccles-Jordan" divide-by-two circuits, today known as flip flops. Early count readings were therefore binary numbers and had to be manually re-calculated into decimal values.
Richter magnitude scale
When Richter presented the resulting scale in 1935 he called it (at the suggestion of Harry Wood) simply a "magnitude" scale. "Richter magnitude" appears to have originated when Perry Byerly told the press that the scale was Richter's, and "should be referred to as such." In 1956 Gutenberg and Richter, while still referring to "magnitude scale", labelled it "local magnitude", with the symbol , to distinguish it from two other scales they had developed, the surface wave magnitude (M) and body wave magnitude (M) scales.
Digital read out
Electronic scales are available with built-in displays so they can be used independently.
Weighing scale
In Egypt, scales can be traced to around 1878 B.C., but their usage probably extends much earlier. Carved stones bearing marks denoting mass and the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for gold have been discovered, which suggests that Egyptian merchants had been using an established system of mass measurement to catalog gold shipments or gold mine yields. Although no actual scales from this era have survived, many sets of weighing stones as well as murals depicting the use of balance scales suggest widespread usage. In China, the earliest weighing balance excavated was from a tomb of the State of Chu of the Chinese Warring States Period dating back to the 3rd to 4th century BC in Mount Zuojiagong near Changsha, Hunan. The balance was made of wood and used bronze masses.
Wedgwood scale
The Wedgwood scale (°W) is an obsolete temperature scale, which was used to measure temperatures above the boiling point of mercury of . The scale and associated measurement technique were proposed by the English potter Josiah Wedgwood in the 18th century. The measurement was based on the shrinking of clay when heated above red heat, and the shrinking was evaluated by comparing heated and unheated clay cylinders. The scale started at being 0° Wedgwood and had 240 steps of . Both the origin and the step were later found inaccurate.
Rømer scale
The Rømer scale is no longer in use but is of some historical importance. Alongside the Newton scale, it was the first "calibrated" scale. Previous thermometers gave only an indication of whether the temperature was rising or falling, or else were highly inaccurate. For instance the top and bottom marks of thermometers were typically set to the hottest and coldest days, respectively, of the current year which clearly would vary from year to year. The idea of using two fiduciary points with equally spaced calibration marks between them was completely new.
Rohn emergency scale
The Rohn emergency scale is a scale on which the magnitude (intensity) of an emergency is measured. It was first proposed in 2006, and explained in more detail in a peer-reviewed paper presented at a 2007 system sciences conference. The idea was further refined later that year. The need for such a scale was ratified in two later independent publications. It is the first scale that quantifies any emergency based on a mathematical model. The scale can be tailored for use at any geographic level – city, county, state or continent. It can be used to monitor the development of an ongoing emergency event, as well as forecast the probability and nature of a potential developing emergency and in the planning and execution of a National Response Plan.
Digital Audio Tape
The first consumer-oriented PCM format used consumer video tape formats (Beta and VHS) as the storage medium. These systems used the EIAJ digital format, which sampled at 44.056 kHz at 14 bits. The Sony PCM-F1 system debuted in 1981, and Sony from the start offered the option of 16-bit wordlength. Other systems were marketed by Akai, JVC, Nakamichi and others. Panasonic, via its Technics division, briefly sold a digital recorder that combined an EIAJ digital adapter with a VHS video transport, the SV-P100. These machines were marketed by consumer electronics companies to consumers, but they were very pricey compared to cassette or even reel-to-reel decks of the time. They did catch on with the more budget conscious professional recordists, and some boutique-label professional releases were recorded using these machines.
Technical drawing tool
A scale ruler is a scaled, three-edged ruler which has six different scales marked to its sides. A typical combination for building details is 1:20, 1:50, 1:100, 1:25, 1:75 and 1:125. There are separate rulers for zoning work as well as for inch units. Today scale rulers are made of plastic, formerly they were made of hardwood. A pocket-sized version is also available, with scales printed on flexible plastic strips.
Weighing scale
In 1669 the Frenchman Gilles Personne de Roberval presented a new kind of balance scale to the French Academy of Sciences. This scale consisted of a pair of vertical columns separated by a pair of equal-length arms and pivoting in the center of each arm from a central vertical column, creating a parallelogram. From the side of each vertical column a peg extended. To the amazement of observers, no matter where Roberval hung two equal weight along the peg, the scale still balanced. In this sense, the scale was revolutionary: it evolved into the more-commonly encountered form consisting of two pans placed on vertical column located above the fulcrum and the parallelogram below them. The advantage of the Roberval design is that no matter where equal weights are placed in the pans, the scale will still balance.
History of computer animation
One of the first programmable digital computers was SEAC (the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer), which entered service in 1950 at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Maryland, USA. In 1957, computer pioneer Russell Kirsch and his team unveiled a drum scanner for SEAC, to "trace variations of intensity over the surfaces of photographs", and so doing made the first digital image by scanning a photograph. The image, picturing Kirsch's three-month-old son, consisted of just 176×176 pixels. They used the computer to extract line drawings, count objects, recognize types of characters and display digital images on an oscilloscope screen. This breakthrough can be seen as the forerunner of all subsequent computer imaging, and recognising the importance of this first digital photograph, Life magazine in 2003 credited this image as one of the "100 Photographs That Changed the World".
Digital synthesizer
Released in 1979, the Casio VL-1 was the first commercial digital synthesizer, selling for $69.95. Yamaha eventually commercialized their FM synthesis technology and released the first FM digital synthesizer in 1980, the Yamaha GS-1, but at an expensive retail price of $16,000.
Digital scan back
The first commercial digital scan back was introduced by "Leaf" (now "Phase One") in 1991.
Braille scale
In aircraft and armored vehicle scale modeling, Braille scale commonly means 1/72 or 1/76 scale. The term was coined by the owners of Missing-Lynx web forum in 1998. Other forums have taken a liking to the phrase since then, and incorporated in their own websites.
Roger W. Riehl
From 1969 through 1970 he worked as an Electronics Engineer at Hobart Manufacturing in Dayton, Ohio. It was here that he was instrumental in the design of the first digital delicatessen weighing scale. He continued to work on his designs and testing of his digital solar-powered wristwatch concept in addition to his responsibilities at Hobart.
Weighing scale
Electronic digital scales display weight as a number, usually on a liquid crystal display (LCD). They are versatile because they may perform calculations on the measurement and transmit it to other digital devices. In a digital scale, the force of the weight causes a spring to deform, and the amount of deformation is measured by one or more transducers called strain gauges. A strain gauge is a conductor whose electrical resistance changes when its length changes. Strain gauges have limited capacity and larger digital scales may use a hydraulic transducer called a load cell instead. A voltage is applied to the device, and the weight causes the current through it to change. The current is converted to a digital number by an analog-to-digital converter, translated by digital logic to the correct units, and displayed on the display. Usually the device is run by a microprocessor chip.
Shore durometer
The scale was defined by Albert Ferdinand Shore, who developed a suitable device to measure hardness in the 1920s. It was neither the first hardness tester nor the first to be called a "durometer" (ISV "duro-" and "-meter"; attested since the 19th century), but today that name usually refers to Shore hardness; other devices use other measures, which return corresponding results, such as for Rockwell hardness.
Sampler (musical instrument)
The earliest digital sampling was done on the EMS Musys system, developed by Peter Grogono (software), David Cockerell (hardware and interfacing) and Peter Zinovieff (system design and operation) at their London (Putney) Studio c. 1969. The system ran on two mini-computers, Digital Equipment PDP-8's. These had a pair of fast D/A and A/D converters, 12,000 (12k) bytes of core memory (RAM), backed up by a hard drive of 32k and by tape storage (DecTape). EMS equipment was used to control the world's first digital studio (EMS London (Putney) Studio), and their earliest digital sampling was done on that system during 1971-1972 for Harrison Birtwistle's ""Chronometer"" released in 1975. 
The first commercially available sampling synthesizer was the Computer Music Melodian by Harry Mendell (1976), while the first polyphonic digital sampling synthesizer was the Australian-produced Fairlight CMI, first available in 1979. These early sampling synthesizers used wavetable sample-based synthesis.
Baumé scale
The Baumé scale is a pair of hydrometer scales developed by French pharmacist Antoine Baumé in 1768 to measure density of various liquids. The unit of the Baumé scale has been notated variously as "degrees Baumé", "B°", "Bé°" and simply Baumé (the accent is not always present). One scale measures the density of liquids heavier than water and the other, liquids lighter than water. The Baumé of distilled water is 0. The API gravity scale is based on errors in early implementations of the Baumé scale.
History of computing hardware
The term digital was first suggested by George Robert Stibitz and refers to where a signal, such as a voltage, is not used to directly represent a value (as it would be in an analog computer), but to encode it. In November 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs (1930–1941), completed a relay-based calculator he later dubbed the "Model K" (for "kitchen table", on which he had assembled it), which became the first binary adder. Typically signals have two states – low (usually representing 0) and high (usually representing 1), but sometimes three-valued logic is used, especially in high-density memory. Modern computers generally use binary logic, but many early machines were decimal computers. In these machines, the basic unit of data was the decimal digit, encoded in one of several schemes, including binary-coded decimal or BCD, bi-quinary, excess-3, and two-out-of-five code.
Telephone exchange
The concepts of digital switching were developed by various labs in the United States and in Europe from the 1930s onwards. The first prototype digital switch was developed by Bell Labs as part of the ESSEX project while the first true digital exchange to be combined with digital transmission systems was designed by LCT (Laboratoire Central de Telecommunications) in Paris. The first digital switch to be placed into a public network was the Empress Exchange in London, England which was designed by the General Post Office research labs. This was a tandem switch that connected three Strowger exchanges in the London area. The first commercial roll-out of a fully digital local switching system was Alcatel's E10 system which began serving customers in Brittany in Northwestern France in 1972.
Sheldon coin grading scale
In 1949, the original scale was first presented in "Dr. William H. Sheldon's Early American Cents" titled "A Quantitative Scale for condition" as a way to grade Large cents. The scale is known today as the Sheldon scale.
Multimeter
The first digital multimeter was manufactured in 1955 by Non Linear Systems. It is claimed that the first "handheld" digital multimeter was developed by Frank Bishop of Intron Electronics in 1977, which at the time presented a major breakthrough for servicing and fault finding in the field.
Kurzweil K250
The Kurzweil K250 was the first electronic instrument to faithfully reproduce the sounds of an acoustic grand piano. It could play up to 12 notes simultaneously (also known as 12-note polyphony) by utilizing individual sounds as well as layered sounds (playing multiple sounds on the same note simultaneously, also known as being multitimbral). Up to that point in time the majority of electronic keyboards utilized synthesized sounds and emulated acoustical instrument sounds created in other electronic instruments using various waveforms produced by oscillators. Five other manufactured digital sampled sound musical instruments were available at that time: E-mu Corporation's E-mu Emulator and E-mu Emulator II; Fairlight Corporation's Fairlight CMI; and New England Digital's Synclavier I and Synclavier II.
Chart recorder
One of the first digital units was designed by William (Bill) C. McElroy jr working for Dohrman Instrument Company in Santa Clara, California. Up until this unit, most chart recorders were rack mounted and had one speed and one sensitivity range. Mr. McElroy's design was an instant loading paper roll 'table-top' unit using an Integrated Chopper Circuit for signal conversion. The unit had plug in circuit boards, plug in single or multi-range modules and plug in single or multi-speed modules. The recorder's sensitivity was 1 microvolt to 100 volts full-scale, which at the time was an industry first. Mr. McElroy also aided in the design and build of the Gas Chromatograph used for analysing dirt and rock samples from the 1969 moon landing.
Alpha scale
The α (alpha) scale is a non-octave-repeating musical scale invented by Wendy Carlos and first used on her album "Beauty in the Beast" (1986). It is derived from approximating just intervals using multiples of a single interval without, as is standard in equal temperaments, requiring an octave (2:1). It may be approximated by dividing the perfect fifth (3:2) into nine equal steps (3:2), or by dividing the minor third (6:5) into four steps (6:5).
Charles Francis Richter
The Richter scale was published in 1935 and immediately became the standard measure of earthquake intensity. Richter did not seem concerned that Gutenberg's name was not included at first; but in later years, after Gutenberg was already dead, Richter began to insist for his colleague to be recognized for expanding the scale to apply to earthquakes all over the globe, not just in southern California. Since 1935, several other magnitude scales have been developed.
Stepped reckoner
The step reckoner (or stepped reckoner) was a digital mechanical calculator invented by the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz around 1672 and completed in 1694. The name comes from the translation of the German term for its operating mechanism, "Staffelwalze", meaning 'stepped drum'. It was the first calculator that could perform all four arithmetic operations.
Ordnance Survey
From 1824, the OS began a 6 inch (1:10,560) survey of Ireland for taxation purposes but found this to be inadequate for urban areas and adopted the five-foot scale (1:1056) for Irish cities and towns. From 1840, the six-inch standard was adopted in Great Britain for the un-surveyed northern counties and the 1:1056 scale also began to be adopted for urban surveys. Between 1842 and 1895, some 400 towns were mapped at 1:500 (126 inches), 1:528 (120 inches, "10 foot scale") or 1:1056 (60 inches), with the remaining towns mapped at 1:2500 (~25 inches). In 1855, the Treasury authorised funding for 1:2500 for rural areas and 1:500 for urban areas. The 1:500 scale was considered more 'rational' than 1:528 and became known as the "sanitary scale" since its primary purpose was to support establishment of mains sewerage and water supply. However, a review of the Ordnance Survey in 1892 found that sales of the 1:500 series maps were very poor and the Treasury declined to fund their continuing maintenance, declaring that any revision or new mapping at this scale must be self-financing. Very few towns and cities saw a second edition of the town plans: by 1909 only fourteen places had paid for updates. The review determined that revision of 1:2500 mapping should proceed apace.
Riddle scale
The Riddle homophobia scale was developed by Dorothy Riddle in 1973–74 while she was overseeing research for the American Psychological Association Task Force on Gays and Lesbians. The scale was distributed at talks and workshops but was not formally published for a long time; it is cited in the literature either as an (unpublished) conference presentation from 1985 or as an article from 1994. At the time it was developed, Riddle's analysis was one of the first modern classifications of attitudes towards homosexuality.
Vernier scale
Calipers without a vernier scale originated in ancient China as early as the Qin dynasty (AD 9). The secondary scale, which contributed extra precision, was invented in 1631 by French mathematician Pierre Vernier (1580–1637). Its use was described in detail in English in "Navigatio Britannica" (1750) by mathematician and historian John Barrow. While calipers are the most typical use of Vernier scales today, they were originally developed for angle-measuring instruments such as astronomical quadrants.
Level of measurement
Stevens proposed his typology in a 1946 "Science" article titled "On the theory of scales of measurement". In that article, Stevens claimed that all measurement in science was conducted using four different types of scales that he called "nominal," "ordinal," "interval," and "ratio," unifying both "qualitative" (which are described by his "nominal" type) and "quantitative" (to a different degree, all the rest of his scales). The concept of scale types later received the mathematical rigour that it lacked at its inception with the work of mathematical psychologists Theodore Alper (1985, 1987), Louis Narens (1981a, b), and R. Duncan Luce (1986, 1987, 2001). As Luce (1997, p. 395) wrote:
To give a better overview the values in 'Mathematical Operators', 'Advanced operations' and 'Central tendency' are only the ones this level of measurement introduces. The complete list includes the values of previous levels. This is inverted for the 'Measure property'. 
The nominal type differentiates between items or subjects based only on their names or (meta-)categories and other qualitative classifications they belong to; thus dichotomous data involves the construction of classifications as well as the classification of items. Discovery of an exception to a classification can be viewed as progress. Numbers may be used to represent the variables but the numbers do not have numerical value or relationship: for example, a globally unique identifier.
Z scale
The first attempts to use digital system in Z scale were based on NEM standard, Selectrix, which offered the smallest decoders in the market, with thicknesses of less than 2 mm. German company Müt brought also the first digital control central unit designed specially for Z scale in the market in the early 2000s. Use of the popular National Model Railroad Association (NMRA) Digital Command Control (DCC) standard has expanded substantially in Z scale recently as locomotive decoders with sizes comparable to the sizes of smallest Selectrix decoders have become available.
Enigmatic scale
The enigmatic scale ("scala enigmatica") is an unusual musical scale, with elements of both major and minor scales, as well as the whole-tone scale. It was originally published in a Milan journal as a musical challenge, with an invitation to harmonize it in some way.
History of photography
In 1957, a team led by Russell A. Kirsch at the National Institute of Standards and Technology developed a binary digital version of an existing technology, the wirephoto drum scanner, so that alphanumeric characters, diagrams, photographs and other graphics could be transferred into digital computer memory. One of the first photographs scanned was a picture of Kirsch's infant son Walden. The resolution was 176x176 pixels with only one bit per pixel, i.e., stark black and white with no intermediate gray tones, but by combining multiple scans of the photograph done with different black-white threshold settings, grayscale information could also be acquired.
Seismic intensity scales
The first simple classification of earthquake intensity was devised by Domenico Pignataro in the 1780s. However, the first recognisable intensity scale in the modern sense of the word was drawn up by P.N.G. Egen in 1828; it was ahead of its time. The first widely adopted intensity scale, the "Rossi–Forel scale", was introduced in the late 19th century. Since then numerous intensity scales have been developed and are used in different parts of the world.
Bark scale
The Bark scale is a psychoacoustical scale proposed by Eberhard Zwicker in 1961. It is named after Heinrich Barkhausen who proposed the first subjective measurements of loudness. One definition of the term is "...a frequency scale on which equal distances correspond with perceptually equal distances. Above about 500 Hz this scale is more or less equal to a logarithmic frequency axis. Below 500 Hz the Bark scale becomes more and more linear."
Dialing scales
Dialing scales are used to lay out the face of a sundial geometrically. They were proposed by Samuel Foster in 1638, and produced by George Serle and Anthony Thompson in 1658 on a ruler. There are two scales: the latitude scale and the hour scale. They can be used to draw all gnomonic dials – and reverse engineer existing dials to discover their original intended location.
Coggeshall slide rule
Coggeshall first described this apparatus in a paper he released in London titled, "Timber-measure by a line of more ease, dispatch and exactness, then any other way now in use, by a double scale : after the countrey-measure, by the length and quarter of the circumference in round timber, and by the length and side of the square in squared timber, and square equal in flat timber : as also stone-measure and gauging of vessels by the same near and exact way, likewise a diagonal scale of 100 parts in a quarter of an inch, very easie both to make and use."
Digital painting
The earliest graphical manipulation program was called Sketchpad. Created in 1963 by Ivan Sutherland, a grad student at MIT, Sketchpad allowed the user to manipulate objects on a CRT (cathode ray tube). Sketchpad eventually led to the creation of the Rand Tablet for work on the GRAIL project in 1968, and the very first tablet was created. Other early tablets, or digitizers, like the ID (intelligent digitizer) and the BitPad were commercially successful and used in CAD (Computer Aided Design) programs. Modern day tablets are the tools of choice by digital painters. WACOM is the industry leader in tablets which can range in size from 4” x 6” all the way to 12” x 19” and are less than an inch thick. Other brands of graphic tablets are Aiptek, Monoprice, Hanvon, Genius, Adesso, Trust, Manhattan, Vistablet, DigiPro, etc.
All these graphic tablets have the basic functions of a mouse, so they can be used as a mouse, not only in graphic editors but also as a replacement for a mouse, and they are compatible with practically all Windows and Macintosh software.
1:285 scale
1:285 scale or 6 mm figure size is a US Army scale introduced in the late 1960s, and used for wargames and some scale model dioramas. It is used in miniature wargaming to depict large battles in a relatively small gaming area. 1:300 scale (5 mm scale) is an almost identical NATO standard scale.
Sensation Seeking Scale
The first Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) was created by Martin Zuckerman and others in 1964. This was considered Form I and Form II was similar, though slightly revised. Analysis and use of these two forms showed that there was more than one dimension to sensation seeking behavior. This paper found that there were four components to sensation seeking thrill, social, visual and antisocial. Form III was the introduction of an experimental form with 113 items on it. In 1971, the scale was further revised to From IV and the sensation seeking components were revised with it to include: thrill, experience, disinhibition and boredom susceptibility. This scale also had some reliability issues and the scoring and so in 1978 it was revised one more time to the current Form V. In 1993 a new scale was developed for children. The scale slightly changed the factors to thrill and adventure seeking, drug and alcohol attitudes and social disinhibition.
Digital photography
The first self-contained (portable) digital camera was created later in 1975 by Steven Sasson of Eastman Kodak. Sasson's camera used CCD image sensor chips developed by Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973. The camera weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg), recorded black and white images to a cassette tape, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), and took 23 seconds to capture its first image in December 1975. The prototype camera was a technical exercise, not intended for production. While it was not until 1981 that the first consumer camera was produced by Sony, Inc., the groundwork for digital imaging and photography had been laid.
Acoustic scale
In music, the acoustic scale, overtone scale, Lydian dominant scale, or Lydian 7 scale, is a seven-note synthetic scale.
Model aircraft
Scales are not usually random, but are based upon simple divisions of either the Imperial system, or the Metric system.
For example, 1:48 scale is 1/4" to 1-foot (or 1" to 4 feet) and 1:72 is 1" to 6 feet, while metric scales are simpler, such as 1:100th, which equals 1 centimeter to 1 meter.
1:72 scale was first introduced in the Skybirds wood and metal model aircraft kits in 1932. Skybirds was followed closely by Frog which produced 1:72 scale aircraft in 1936 under the "Frog Penguin" name. According to "Fine Scale Modeler" magazine, 1:72 was also popularized by the US War Department during the Second World War when it requested models of single engine aircraft at that scale. The War Department also requested models of multi-engine aircraft at a scale of 1:144. The War Department was hoping to educate Americans in the identification of aircraft. These scales provided the best compromise between size and detail. After WWII, manufacturers continued to favor these scales, however kits are commonly available in 1:48, 1:35, 1:32, and 1:24 scales. The French firm Heller SA is one of the few manufacturer to offer models in the scale of 1:125, while 1:50th and 1:100th are more common in Japan and France which both use Metric. Herpa and others produce promotional models for airlines in scales including 1:200, 1:400, 1:500, 1:600, 1:1000 and more. A few First World War aircraft were offered at 1:28 by Revell, such as the Fokker Dr.I and Sopwith Camel.
Richter magnitude scale
The so-called Richter magnitude scale – more accurately, "Richter's magnitude scale", or just "Richter magnitude" – for measuring the strength ("size") of earthquakes refers to the original "magnitude scale" developed by Charles F. Richter and presented in his landmark 1935 paper, and later revised and renamed the Local magnitude scale, denoted as "ML" or "M". Because of various shortcomings of the ML scale most seismological authorities now use other scales, such as the moment magnitude scale (), to report earthquake magnitudes, but much of the news media still refers to these as "Richter" magnitudes. All magnitude scales retain the logarithmic character of the original, and are scaled to have roughly comparable numeric values.
Digital microscope
An early digital microscope was made by a company in Tokyo, Japan in 1986, which is now known as Hirox Co. LTD . It included a control box and a lens connected to a computer. The original connection to the computer was analog through an S-video connection. Over time that connection was changed to Firewire 800 to handle a large amount of digital information coming from the digital camera. But some of their current advanced versions are all-in-one and do not require a computer. The most advanced all-in-one systems now have HD monitors built-in.
The invention of the USB port resulted in a multitude of USB microscopes ranging in quality and magnification. They continue to fall in price, especially compared with traditional optical microscopes. They offer high-resolution images which are normally recorded directly to a computer, and which also use the computer power for their built-in LED light source. The resolution is directly related to the number of megapixels available on a specific model, from 1.3 MP, 2 MP, 5 MP and upwards.
Temperature measurement
Attempts at standardized temperature measurement prior to the 17th century were crude at best. For instance in 170 AD, physician Claudius Galenus mixed equal portions of ice and boiling water to create a "neutral" temperature standard. The modern scientific field has its origins in the works by Florentine scientists in the 1600s including Galileo constructing devices able to measure relative change in temperature, but subject also to confounding with atmospheric pressure changes. These early devices were called thermoscopes. The first sealed thermometer was constructed in 1641 by the Grand Duke of Toscani, Ferdinand II. The development of today's thermometers and temperature scales began in the early 18th century, when Gabriel Fahrenheit produced a mercury thermometer and scale, both developed by Ole Christensen Rømer. Fahrenheit's scale is still in use, alongside the Celsius and Kelvin scales.
Quartz crisis
In 1976 Omega introduced the Omega Chrono-Quartz, the world's first analogue-digital chronograph, which was succeeded within 12 months by the Calibre 1620, the company's first completely LCD chronograph wristwatch.
Newton scale
The Newton scale is a temperature scale devised by Isaac Newton in 1701.
He called his device a "thermometer", but he did not use the term "temperature", speaking of "degrees of heat" ("gradus caloris") instead.
Newton's publication represents the first attempt to introduce an objective way of measuring (what would come to be called) temperature (alongside the Rømer scale published at nearly the same time).
Newton likely developed his scale for practical use rather than for a theoretical interest in thermodynamics; he had been appointed Warden of the Mint in 1695, and Master of the Mint in 1699, and his interest in the boiling points of metals are likely inspired by his duties in connection with the Royal Mint.
O scale
O scale (or O gauge) is a scale commonly used for toy trains and rail transport modelling. Originally introduced by German toy manufacturer Märklin around 1900, by the 1930s three-rail alternating current O gauge was the most common model railroad scale in the United States and remained so until the early 1960s. In Europe, its popularity declined before World War II due to the introduction of smaller scales.
Rossi–Forel scale
The Rossi–Forel scale was one of the first seismic scales to reflect earthquake intensities. Developed by Michele Stefano Conte de Rossi of Italy and François-Alphonse Forel of Switzerland in the late 19th century, it was used for about two decades until the introduction of the Mercalli intensity scale in 1902.
History of hearing aids
One of the first digital chips was created by Daniel Graupe. The digital chip, referred to as the Zeta Noise Blocker, routinely adjusted the gain in the frequency channels to help control high levels of noise. The chip was integrated in a number of hearing aids in the 1980s. In addition to the Zeta Noise Blocker, there was a development of digital chips that were devoted to high-speed digital signal processing or DSP. DSP chips became available in 1982, and began to be implemented into hearing aids. By 1988, chips were produced in hearing aids. One of the major contributions of these chips was the ability to process both speech and other types of noises in real time. One major down fall of these chips was that they were massive and used up a lot of battery, which made them nearly impossible to be worn.
Scale model
The most popular scale to go with a given gauge was often derived at by the following roundabout process. German artisans would take strips of metal of standard metric size to make things to blueprints whose dimensions were in inches: hence "4 mm to the foot" yields the 1:76.2 size of the "OO scale". This British scale is anomalously used on the standard HO/OO scale (16.5 mm gauge from 3.5 mm/foot scale) tracks, however, because early electric motors weren't available commercially in smaller sizes.
Digital differential analyzer
The first DDA built was the Magnetic Drum Digital Differential Analyzer of 1950.
Weighing scale
The oldest evidence for the existence of weighing scales dates to c. 2400–1800 B.C. in the Indus River valley (modern-day Pakistan). Prior to that, no banking was performed due to lack of scales. Uniform, polished stone cubes discovered in early settlements were probably used as mass-setting stones in balance scales. Although the cubes bear no markings, their masses are multiples of a common denominator. The cubes are made of many different kinds of stones with varying densities. Clearly their mass, not their size or other characteristics, was a factor in sculpting these cubes.
History of science and technology in Japan
Boss Corporation's DD-2 Digital Delay, released in 1983, was the world's first digital delay effects unit in stomp box form. It uses a custom integrated circuit (IC) chip that was originally developed for Roland Corporation's SDE-3000 rack delay unit. It was succeeded by the DD-3 Digital Delay in 1986. Boss Corporation's RV-2 Digital Reverb, released in 1987, was the world's first digital reverb pedal. It used a new custom DSP processor developed by Boss, originally for the RRV-10 Digital Reverb in the Micro Rack series.Yamaha developed an early multi-voice polyphonic synthesizer, the Yamaha GX-1, in 1973. In 1974, Roland Corporation released the EP-30, the first touch-sensitive electronic keyboard. Roland released an early polyphonic string synthesizer, the Roland RS-202, in 1975, followed by the Roland RS-202 in 1976.In 1973, Yamaha licensed the algorithms for frequency modulation synthesis (FM synthesis) from John Chowning, who had experimented with it at Stanford University since 1971. Yamaha's engineers began adapting Chowning's algorithm for use in a commercial digital synthesizer, adding improvements such as the "key scaling" method to avoid the introduction of distortion that normally occurred in analog systems during frequency modulation. In the 1970s, Yamaha were granted a number of patents, under the company's former name "Nippon Gakki Seizo Kabushiki Kaisha", evolving Chowning's early work on FM synthesis technology. Yamaha built the first prototype digital synthesizer in 1974.
Seismic magnitude scales
The surface-wave magnitude scale, variously denoted as Ms, M, and M, is based on a procedure developed by Beno Gutenberg in 1942 for measuring shallow earthquakes stronger or more distant than Richter's original scale could handle. Notably, it measured the amplitude of surface waves (which generally produce the largest amplitudes) for a period of "about 20 seconds". The scale approximately agrees with at ~6, then diverges by as much as half a magnitude. A revision by , sometimes labeled M, measures only waves of the first second.
DeLorme
In 2009, DeLorme released D.A.E. (Digital Atlas of the Earth). It is the first worldwide GPS accurate topographical map with a scale of 1 to 50,000. D.A.E. is the official world map for the US and Australian militaries. It is a virtual globe of the earth that is almost 1,000 feet in diameter.
Thaddeus Fairbanks
These platform scales revolutionized weighing methods of large loads that has been in use ever since. Portable platform scales are found in almost every hardware store, physician's office, and manufacturing factory throughout the United States. The first railway track platform scale patent was granted to Fairbanks on January 13, 1857, as Patent No. 16,381. In 1916 the company was purchased by Fairbanks, Morse and Company. Ownership of the company has since changed several times, but Fairbanks Scales continue to be made in St. Johnsbury to this day.
Weighing scale
These scales are used in the modern bakery, grocery, delicatessen, seafood, meat, produce and other perishable goods departments. Supermarket scales can print labels and receipts, mark mass and count, unit price, total price and in some cases tare. Some modern supermarket scales print an RFID tag that can be used to track the item for tampering or returns. In most cases, these types of scales have a sealed calibration so that the reading on the display is correct and cannot be tampered with. In the USA, the scales are certified by the National Type Evaluation Program (NTEP), in South Africa by the South African Bureau of Standards and in the UK by the International Organization of Legal Metrology.
Electronic musical instrument
The first digital synthesizers were academic experiments in sound synthesis using digital computers. FM synthesis was developed for this purpose; as a way of generating complex sounds digitally with the smallest number of computational operations per sound sample. In 1983 Yamaha introduced the first stand-alone digital synthesizer, the DX-7. It used frequency modulation synthesis (FM synthesis), first developed by John Chowning at Stanford University during the late sixties. Chowning exclusively licensed his FM synthesis patent to Yamaha in 1975. Yamaha subsequently released their first FM synthesizers, the GS-1 and GS-2, which were costly and heavy. There followed a pair of smaller, preset versions, the CE20 and CE25 Combo Ensembles, targeted primarily at the home organ market and featuring four-octave keyboards. Yamaha's third generation of digital synthesizers was a commercial success; it consisted of the DX7 and DX9 (1983). Both models were compact, reasonably priced, and dependent on custom digital integrated circuits to produce FM tonalities. The DX7 was the first mass market all-digital synthesizer. It became indispensable to many music artists of the 1980s, and demand soon exceeded supply. The DX7 sold over 200,000 units within three years.
Dialing scales
Dialing scales were first discussed by Samuel Foster in 1638. P. Pierre Bobynet, a Jesuit drew a scale in his book "L'horographie ingenieuse contenant des Connoissances, & Curiositez Agréables dans la composition des Cadrans", in 1647. It was however George Serles 1657 book, "Dialling Universal", printed by R & W Leybourn that brought them to popular attention. These scales remained virtually unchanged for 250 years. E. C. Middleton, who had been engraving dialling scales from about 1895, supplied dialling scales accompanied by a typewritten instruction book from Birmingham in 1913– these were the scales calculated by Serle. The North American Sundial Society has printed facsimiles of both the Serle and Middleton books.
The Middleton dial appeared without explanation in the 1994 "Encyclopedia de Diderot et Alembert" (French). Further work has done on these rulers by F.W. Cousins, and by Fred W Sawyer from 1997–2009.
Cyborg antenna
Harbisson's Sonochromatic Music Scale (2003) is a microtonal and logarithmic scale with 360 notes in an octave. Each note corresponds to a specific degree of the color wheel. The scale was introduced to the first antenna in 2004.
Z scale
Z scale is one of the smallest commercially available model railway scales (1:220), with a track gauge of . Introduced by Märklin in 1972, Z scale trains operate on 0–10 volts DC and offer the same operating characteristics as all other two-rail, direct-current, analog model railways. Locomotives can be fitted with digital decoders for independent control. Model trains, track, structures, and human/animal figures are readily available in European, North American, and Japanese styles from a variety of manufacturers.
Multi-scale fingerboard
Possibly the first modern multiscale fretboard was used on an instrument called a StarrBoard, invented by John D. Starrett in 1977. Starrett developed a tapping instrument that employs a matrix of halftones, fretted horizontally with strings spaced vertically, to allow one fingering to cover all scales. Because of the large range of notes from low B below E on a bass, to high B four octaves above, however, he needed a way to have a long scale for the low B, but a shorter scale for the high B. He simply laid out the two scales he thought would work and connected the dots.
Calculator
The first truly pocket-sized electronic calculator was the Busicom LE-120A "HANDY", which was marketed early in 1971. Made in Japan, this was also the first calculator to use an LED display, the first hand-held calculator to use a single integrated circuit (then proclaimed as a "calculator on a chip"), the Mostek MK6010, and the first electronic calculator to run off replaceable batteries. Using four AA-size cells the LE-120A measures .
Ewald Kienle
From 1980 onwards, Ewald Kienle developed digital church organs. In Europe, the first digital church organ (Model Kienle PK II), was installed in the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 1985 and was inaugurated with a Bach concert.
Dollhouse
The most common standard for adult collectors is scale, also called 1" or one inch scale (where 1 foot is represented by 1 inch.) Among adult collectors there are also smaller scales which are much more common in the United States than in Britain. or half inch scale (1 foot is 1/2") was popular in Marx dollhouses in the 1950s but only became widely available in collectible houses after 2002, about the same time that even smaller scales became more popular, like or quarter inch scale (1 foot is 1/4") and or "dollhouse for a dollhouse" scale.
Decade (log scale)
Decades on a logarithmic scale, rather than unit steps (steps of 1) or other linear scale, are commonly used on the horizontal axis when representing the frequency response of electronic circuits in graphical form, such as in Bode plots, since depicting large frequency ranges on a linear scale is often not practical. For example, an audio amplifier will usually have a frequency band ranging from 20 Hz to 20 kHz and representing the entire band using a decade log scale is very convenient. Typically the graph for such a representation would begin at 1 Hz (10) and go up to perhaps 100 kHz (10), to comfortably include the full audio band in a standard-sized graph paper, as shown below. Whereas in the same distance on a linear scale, with 10 as the major step-size, you might only get from 0 to 50.
Plate scale
since
Digital audio
The first 16-bit PCM recording in the United States was made by Thomas Stockham at the Santa Fe Opera in 1976, on a Soundstream recorder. An improved version of the Soundstream system was used to produce several classical recordings by Telarc in 1978. The 3M digital multitrack recorder in development at the time was based on BBC technology. The first all-digital album recorded on this machine was Ry Cooder's "Bop till You Drop" in 1979. British record label Decca began development of its own 2-track digital audio recorders in 1978 and released the first European digital recording in 1979.
1:24 scale
1:24 scale is a very popular size for automobile models such as injection-molded plastic model kits or metal die-cast toys, which are built and collected by both children and adults. 1:24 means that a unit of measurement, such as one inch or one centimeter, on the model represents 24 units on the actual object. An example would be one inch of length on a model automobile would represent 24 inches on the real vehicle. Primarily automobile models are made in this scale, with a few examples of tractor trailers and other larger equipment. In the United States there is a very minor variation of the 1:24 scale, where many automobile plastic model kits are scaled at 1:25.
1:24 is the largest of the traditional slot car sizes - and the earliest. Lionel's (USA) 1:24 electric autos of 1912-1916 became the first known commercial slot cars. In 1955, the Model Automobile Racing Association of Kalamazoo, Michigan, built the first track for electric rail-racing (the short-lived immediate predecessor to slot racing) in the US. Unlike the seminal Southport (UK) track that inspired it, the MARA table was designed for 1:24 as well as competition. With that beginning, the US adopted 1:24 as the primary scale for serious competition during the heyday of slot car racing in the 1960s, while Britain and Europe favored 1:32, and have continued to do so.
Minolta RD-175
The Minolta RD-175 was probably the first digital SLR which was hand portable. Up until 1995 when this was introduced, the only digital SLR on the market had a very bulky external digital storage system. There were other primitive digital cameras but they were much lower resolution. Minolta combined an existing SLR with a three way splitter and three separate CCD image sensors, giving 1.75M pixel resolution. The base of the DSLR was the Minolta Maxxum 500si Super (the Dynax 500si Super in Europe and as Alpha 303si Super in Asia). Agfa produced a version of the RD-175 retailed as the Agfa ActionCam.
Weighing scale
Variations on the balance scale, including devices like the cheap and inaccurate "bismar" (unequal-armed scales), began to see common usage by c. 400 B.C. by many small merchants and their customers. A plethora of scale varieties each boasting advantages and improvements over one another appear throughout recorded history, with such great inventors as Leonardo da Vinci lending a personal hand in their development.
Russell A. Kirsch
In 1957, Kirsch's group developed a digital image scanner, to “trace variations of intensity over the surfaces of photographs”, and made the first digital scans. One of the first photographs scanned, a picture of Kirsch’s three-month-old son, was captured as just 30,976 pixels, a 176 × 176 array, in an area measuring 5 cm × 5 cm. The bit depth was only one bit per pixel, stark black and white with no intermediate shades of gray, but by combining several scans made using different scanning thresholds, grayscale information could also be acquired. They used the computer to extract line drawings, count objects, recognize alphanumeric characters and produce oscilloscope displays. Kirsch also proposed the Kirsch operator for edge detection.
Full scale
In electronics and signal processing, full scale or full code represents the maximum amplitude a system can represent. In digital systems, a signal is said to be at digital full scale when its magnitude has reached the maximum representable value.
Beta scale
The β (beta) scale is a non-octave-repeating musical scale invented by Wendy Carlos and first used on her album "Beauty in the Beast" (1986). It is derived from approximating just intervals using multiples of a single interval without, as is standard in equal temperaments, requiring an octave (2:1). It may be approximated by splitting the perfect fifth (3:2) into eleven equal parts (3:2≈63.8 cents). It may be approximated by splitting the perfect fourth (4:3) into two equal parts (4:3), or eight equal parts ((4:3=64 cents)), totaling approximately 18.8 steps per octave.
Södra Bankohuset
From at least the reign of King Magnus Eriksson (1316–1377) the official scales of the city meant an important source of income for the city and the king alike. From no later than the 15th century the scales were located at the city's southern square, and subsequently the building housing the scales and preceding the present building was called "Våghuset" ("Scales House" or Weigh house). As the city introduced more scales, probably in 1637, the southern scales were being used exclusively for the weighing of iron, copper, and other metals, which eventually gave the square next to it its present name "Järntorget" ("The Iron Square"). Given a depiction in an etching from 1660, and the location of the water front and city wall at the time, the Scales House is likely to have been located somewhere in the middle of the present site. It is depicted as having gables facing west and east with rows of six windows facing the alleys; probably occupying an area of 18×18 metres.
ELKA
The first model, the ELKA 6521, was introduced in 1965, and used germanium transistors and a nixie tube display. It weighed 8.5 kg and was allegedly the first calculator in the world to include a square root function. Its developers – Lyubomir Antonov, Petar Popov and Stefan Angelov, were the first scientists in the field of electronics to win the highest honour in Bulgaria at the time, the Order of Georgi Dimitrov.
Chromatic scale
The most common conception of the chromatic scale before the 13th century was the Pythagorean chromatic scale (). Due to a different tuning technique, the twelve semitones in this scale have two slightly different sizes. Thus, the scale is not perfectly symmetric. Many other tuning systems, developed in the ensuing centuries, share a similar asymmetry.
Digital Audio Tape
Digital Audio Tape (DAT or R-DAT) is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987. In appearance it is similar to a Compact Cassette, using 3.81 mm / 0.15" (commonly referred to as 4 mm) magnetic tape enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm. As the name suggests, the recording is digital rather than analog. DAT has the ability to record at higher, equal or lower sampling rates than a CD (48, 44.1 or 32 kHz sampling rate respectively) at 16 bits quantization. If a digital source is copied, then the DAT will produce an exact clone, unlike other digital media such as Digital Compact Cassette or non-Hi-MD MiniDisc, both of which use a lossy data reduction system.
Synthetic scale
In music, a synthetic scale is a scale that derives from a traditional diatonic major scale by altering of one degree by a semitone in either direction. Composer Ferruccio Busoni originally explored these scales in his "A New Esthetic of Music" and their number and variety were later clarified by J. Murray Barbour, who also proposed applying the procedure to scales of more or less than seven degrees, including pentatonic scales.
Delisle scale
The Delisle scale (°D) is a temperature scale invented in 1732 by the French astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle (1688–1768). Delisle was the author of "Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et aux progrès de l'Astronomie, de la Géographie et de la Physique" (1738).
S scale
S Scale is one of the oldest model railroading scales. The earliest known 1:64 scale train was constructed from card in 1896. The first working models appeared in England in the early 20th century. Modeling in S Scale increased in the 1930s-1940s when CD Models marketed 3/16" model trains.
Contax N Digital
It was noteworthy for being the first full-frame digital SLR, with an imaging chip the full size of a 135 film frame. All previous digital SLRs had a smaller sensor, giving a cropped view (see magnification factor). The imaging sensor was a Philips FTF3020-C, which had previously been used in the Jenoptik "Eyelike" medium format digital back. Pentax also planned to use the sensor in a full-frame digital SLR, the Pentax MZ-D, but abandoned work on the prototype in late 2001. The sensor featured ISO settings as low as ISO 25, but the reviews noted that it had a relatively high noise level above ISO 100. The next full-frame digital SLRs were the Canon EOS-1Ds of late 2002, followed by Kodak's DCS Pro 14n in 2003. Nikon and Sony introduced full-frame models in 2007 and 2008 respectively.
List of Dutch inventions and innovations
Various authors have credited the invention of the thermometer to Cornelis Drebbel, Robert Fludd, Galileo Galilei or Santorio Santorio. The thermometer was not a single invention, however, but a development. However, each inventor and each thermometer was unique – there was no standard scale. In 1665 Christiaan Huygens suggested using the melting and boiling points of water as standards, and in 1694 Carlo Renaldini proposed using them as fixed points on a universal scale. In 1701 Isaac Newton proposed a scale of 12 degrees between the melting point of ice and body temperature. Finally in 1724 Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit produced a temperature scale which now (slightly adjusted) bears his name. He could do this because he manufactured thermometers, using mercury (which has a high coefficient of expansion) for the first time and the quality of his production could provide a finer scale and greater reproducibility, leading to its general adoption. The Fahrenheit scale was the first widely used temperature scale. By the end of the 20th century, most countries used the Celsius scale rather than the Fahrenheit scale, though Canada retained it as a supplementary scale used alongside Celsius. Fahrenheit remains the official scale for Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Belize, the Bahamas, Palau and the United States and associated territories.
CAS Corporation
CAS was the first Korean company to export electronic scales in 1987 and to develop a label printing scale in 1992 (model LP, which was an abbreviation for "label printing").
Z scale
Z scale was introduced by the German model train manufacturer Märklin in 1972 at the Nuremberg Toy Fair. It was the brainchild of Helmut Killian, Märklin's head design engineer at the time. The letter "Z" was chosen to designate the new scale, its place as the last character of the German and English alphabets signaling the thought that there would never be a smaller commercial model railway scale. While there have been attempts since then to bring even smaller scales to the market, they remain niche products without a wider followingthe largest market being T gauge (1:450, gauge), designed in Japan and manufactured in China.
Weighing scale
Digital kitchen scales are used for weighing food in a kitchen during cooking. These are usually light-weight and compact.
Digital Multiplex System
Exploratory development on the technology began at Northern Telecom's Bell Northern Research Labs (Ottawa, Ontario) in 1971. The first Class 5 switch, the DMS-10, began service on 21 October 1977 in Fort White, Florida and the first toll switch (Class 4), the DMS-200, entered service in 1979 in Ottawa, Ontario. The DMS-10 was the first commercially successful Class 5 digital switch in the North American market and had a profound impact on the industry. Of the numerous digital switching products introduced in the North American telephone market in the late 1970s, only the Nortel DMS family is still in production. GENBAND acquired Nortel CVAS assets including the DMS line in 2011 and rolled it into its IP-based GENiUS platform. The GENiUS-750nt is the first product to include adaptive nano-tech compression and resynchronization modules from Ericsson, to replace the digital cross-connect (DCS) in place since the earliest DMS releases.
Survey meter
An instrument which totalises the events detected over a time period is known as a scaler. This colloquial name stems from the early days of automatic counting, when a scaling circuit was required to divide down a high count rate to a speed which mechanical counters could register. This technique was developed by C E Wynn-Williams at The Cavendish Laboratory and first published in 1932. The original counters used the "Eccles-Jordan divider" circuit, today known as a flip flop. This was before the era of electronic indicators, which started with the introduction of the Dekatron tube in the 1950s.
Digital electronics
Mechanical analog computers started appearing in the first century and were later used in the medieval era for astronomical calculations. In World War II, mechanical analog computers were used for specialized military applications such as calculating torpedo aiming. During this time the first electronic digital computers were developed. Originally they were the size of a large room, consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers (PCs).
History of sound recording
The first digital audio recorders were reel-to-reel decks introduced by companies such as Denon (1972), Soundstream (1979) and Mitsubishi. They used a digital technology known as PCM recording. Within a few years, however, many studios were using devices that encoded the digital audio data into a standard video signal, which was then recorded on a U-matic or other videotape recorder, using the rotating-head technology that was standard for video. A similar technology was used for a consumer format, Digital Audio Tape (DAT) which used rotating heads on a narrow tape contained in a cassette. DAT records at sampling rates of 48 kHz or 44.1 kHz, the latter being the same rate used on compact discs. Bit depth is 16 bits, also the same as compact discs. DAT was a failure in the consumer-audio field (too expensive, too finicky, and crippled by anti-copying regulations), but it became popular in studios (particularly home studios) and radio stations. A failed digital tape recording system was the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC).
Weighing scale
Traditional mechanical balance-beam scales intrinsically measured mass. But ordinary electronic scales intrinsically measure the gravitational force between the sample and the earth, i.e. the weight of the sample, which varies with location. So such a scale has to be re-calibrated after installation, for that specific location, in order to obtain an accurate indication of mass.
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company
The Computing Scale Company of America was a holding company, organized in 1901 and amalgamating as subsidiary companies The Computing Scale Company, Dayton, Ohio; The Moneyweight Scale Company, Chicago, Illinois; The W.F. Simpson Company of Detroit, Michigan; and The Stimpson Computing Scale Company of Elkhart, Indiana.
In 1891, Edward Canby and Orange O. Ozias, two businessmen from Dayton, Ohio, purchased the patents for the newly invented computing scale and incorporated the Computing Scale Company for the production of commercial scales.
HO scale
After the First World War there were several attempts to introduce a model railway about half the size of 0 scale that would be more suitable for smaller home layouts and cheaper to manufacture. H0 was created to meet these aims. For this new scale, a track width of 16.5 mm was designed to represent prototypical standard gauge track, and a model scale of 1:87 was chosen. By as early as 1922 the firm Bing in Nuremberg, Germany, had been marketing a "tabletop railway" for several years. This came on a raised, quasi-ballasted track with a gauge of 16.5 mm, which was described at that time either as 00 or H0. The trains initially had a clockwork drive, but from 1924 were driven electrically. Accessory manufacturers, such as Kibri, marketed buildings in the corresponding scale.