Talk:vernier

March 2012
This scale deserves better. Is this? A secondary scale, off by 10% of the primary scale of a measuring device, the Vernier scale helps your eye measure more precisely, between graduations of the primary scale.--Wikidity (talk) 07:39, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Additional senses of the word
I have attempted to add two additional senses of the word, both used in more narrow fields, beyond the first (and only, until now) sense given: 1. A secondary scale with finer graduations than the primary scale of a measuring device; the vernier measures between graduations of the larger scale.

I have added: 2. A secondary control input with finer control than the primary, or coarse, input; for example the vernier frequency tuning knob on a radio. 3.  A secondary system of force application for the attitude control of a spacecraft; for example a vernier thruster.

The second sense was widely used in electrical and electronic engineering, especially during the heyday of analog controls. Recent advances in digital controls since the 1970s has made the use of vernier controls much less common, but virtually no high-quality piece of electrical engineering test equipment, or radio tuner, failed to have a vernier control knob (or many knobs) in the 1920s-1960s.

The third sense is really mostly used in an applied field of physics: spaceflight. But the discipline tag blew up when I tried to put that in instead of 'physics'.

I'm sure someone who knows words better than I can clean up the stub definitions I have left. Cheers. N2e (talk) 17:55, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I (being aged) can remember such a control on a valve radio from the 1940s / 1950s (but didn't know what it was called). You twiddled the small knob, and the larger one (on the same axis) moved slowly. SemperBlotto (talk) 18:01, 16 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your comment, Semper. Please feel free to fix the article itself, as I am pretty sure I did not get the new senses described completely well in the usual wiki format.  Cheers.  N2e (talk) 04:35, 21 December 2012 (UTC)