from Hacker News

Surveillance and the history of 19th-century wearable tech

by lapetitejort on 11/15/24, 3:52 PM with 13 comments

• by lukan on 11/15/24, 5:50 PM

  "Another story in the Railway and Engineering Review included a similar hack attempt by a Portland night watchman. Having previously been caught mechanically rigging the button-pushing work of his nightly rounds, the watchman was given a pedometer to ensure that he was manually completing his work. Although this use of quantum media — media that count, quantify, or enumerate — to more closely monitor the watchman’s activities seemed to work for several nights, he was eventually found sleeping in the engine room, having attached the pedometer to a piston rod"

  Having worked briefly in security - I found it hilarious. Nowdays it works by scanning RFID chips on the guarded areas with a smartphone, so cheating here is way harder (I considered it of course), it would have included hacking the work smartphone and the surveillance software.

  Either way - the other nightguards there complained a lot because of their recent high raise in workload - which now meant patrolling by car and foot for 2 hours, instead of 1 - then you checked in all the points - and could sleep or play consoles for the next 10 hours (or in my case programming on my projects), as long as you could wake up if an actual alarm happened. So not that much stress ..

• by lapetitejort on 11/15/24, 6:13 PM

  The article mentions that carriages had odometers, which I found just as surprising as pedometers existing in that era. I'd love to see more tech that we consider beginning in the 20th century that is actually older.

• by storyinmemo on 11/15/24, 6:11 PM

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock

  I found the pre-electronic way of having a portable audit clock that had keys attached to buildings with numbers that would stamp the clock rather fascinating.