iii There is nothing new. You might have thought that
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tachographs and spies in the cab were a relatively recent innovation, but you'd be wrong.
The tachograph appears to have been invented in Toledo in Spain in 1068, to keep track of the oxen and cart hauliers who wilfully broke the city's complex hours' law. El Greco Livingstone's famous eleventh century city cart ban caused ructions in the city streets too, I am reliably informed.
I stumbled across the above "planispheric astrolabe" in that suitably intellectual magazine The Listener last week. We at Commercial Motor like to keep abreast of scholarly matters. The magazine in question was trying to tell the world that the device was a flat metal disc used to calculate the altitude of stars and other planets on view in the night-time sky. We know differently, don't we?
Probably the best thing to do is keep the real use of Toledo's 1068 planispheric astrolabe secret and wait until the archaeologists discover a tachograph analysis machine from the same period. Then we can spring the news of the device's real and shocking purpose on an unsuspecting world.
Meanwhile, shhh, you never know who's listening.