The Enduring Fascination of ASCII-Rays

.: The Enduring Fascination of ASCII-Rays :.

The following shows the transcript, track, ray "burn" or "emission-ghost" of an intense beam of "eth"s and "thorn"s output by an antique Middle English Helium-Neon Char-Maser.

Such a device was reputed to have been used by Geoffrey Chaucer. The levels of scoring achievable with this early model do not reach nearly the values possible today. See Popular Linguistics Mercenary, Vol. XI, Nr. 2 (February - March Double Issue) for a number of articles about how to construct your own working prototype.

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At the juncture marked "critical", the instrument temperature began to exceed the stress-points of the materials used, and the clown began to burn. This was definitely and definitively what was wanted.

It is possible that a device of this type was responsible for early 18th-century reports of Glimmstrahlen (glow rays) in isolated regions of the Harz Mountains, since one was almost certainly stolen from a collection in Quedlinburg in 1680. The glow rays were described as being composed almost entirely of huge ßs which "danced in the sky and rendered the constellations obscure." No photographs of contemporary effects like this have turned up; the instrument in question is still missing.

AUM