Fragment 48 of 72 · drawer 04
Mechanical character wheel
A textual mechanism specimen showing the temporary nonsense required to move one public character into another.
- Accession
- MW-F-048
- Representative period
- Interpretive display specimen, 1960–2000
- Drawer
- Diagrams & specimens
- Certainty
- moderate
Mechanical character wheel
Interpretive display specimen, 1960–2000
Observed surface
CURRENT FACE: A / TARGET FACE: T
PATH: B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T
Every intermediate face is physically necessary and semantically disposable.
Implied procedure
Parallel modules begin together but stop after different travel distances.
A row resolves unevenly as characters with shorter paths become stable before the rest.
Interpretive residue
The display exposes its transition instead of replacing one state instantaneously.
For a moment, movement is more reliable information than the characters being shown.
Accountability record
Evidence beneath the reconstruction.
These institutional sources support the mechanism or historical practice interpreted above. They do not contain this reconstructed record, its wording, or its invented values.
- The Museum of Modern Art · 1996 object Flight Information Display System (Split Flap Board) A museum catalogue record for a large Solari electromechanical flight-information board, useful as evidence of the physical display as a designed public object. Open institutional record ↗
- Italian Patent and Trademark Office · institutional catalogue Italian patents and designs of historical interest An Italian government catalogue describing Solari's 1956 railway public-information installation in Liège and the electromechanical character system's public role. Open institutional record ↗