which one arrived first?

 Sun Ra did not use the term "birthday" - he referred to "arrival day"... 

so which of the following "arrived" first?

the Western Electric 555...

or Marshall Allen?

the answer below the scroll..

Marshall Allen arrived first! ... in 1924... 

the first 555 drivers were made in the BTL lab in 1926....

fwiw, the two go well together... 

(and see, Iain, I can post!)

peace,

me

(the other one)

work in progress tease

 something that is creeping from the back of my mind into reality....  more to come (and at the rate we add content here....)

Why nickel is so yummy.

 Here is a simple set of low frequency plots of steel (red) vs. nickel (blue) with applied signal levels.

This clearly shows that for low level low frequency information retrieval, steel takes a certain amount of energy to "turn on".