[DGthe3]

As an engineer, I find the mechanical beauty of those old systems fascinating. Things seem to be done in more or less the same sequence now as back then, but the safety and precision are drastically better, largely due to modern automation. One of the things that I noticed was how about half the workers may as well have been robots. Grab, turn, place, wait. Grab, turn, place, wait. Grab, turn, place, wait. Its enough to drive a person insane.

As for the automation back then ... doing things that way is almost becoming a lost art. A lot of those systems were based around mechanical signalling. As a piece of machinery (lets say its a ram) reaches the end of its stroke, it triggers a (usually pneumatic or hydraulic) signal which initiates the next element, that triggers a third, and so on. The mechanical signalling systems were eventually replaced with simple analog electrical ones, where in turn were replaced with complex digital electronics.