Fantastically Intense Wiring

The Mothers of All Messes (and maybe a few fathers, too) The goal of this series (other than to simply entertain) is to raise awareness about the abundance of various tangled messes in the world and to establish the humanitarian fund dedicated to eradicating this blight from the face of the Earth entirely. (well... maybe not, but in any case... take a picture of some private miserable mess which you face every day and send it to us!) We'll start with a few simply very complicated wiring "landscapes", and will progress to nightmarish ones pretty quickly. Image below shows "Years of Progress"... Really? - New York in 1890:

(image via) Support wires in the 1893 ferris wheel in Chicago (notice how small the people appear in this photograph):

(image courtesy Brooklyn Museum Archives, via) Vintage supercomputer wiring ("intense" is the word here): on the left is The Collossus (the World War Two era computer, more info) and the Bombe, the machine designed to crack the Enigma code (right):

(images credit: Mirjam Visser) Inside a vintage supercomputer: the unassuming front view, and... the peek inside -

(images via) This is a sound console - "Nine Inch Nails" dimmer racks from the Australian SoundWave Festival - which has around 400 channels in all (ironically, all this gets controlled by one 5-pin DMX cable quarter-inch thick):

(image sent in by Andrew Nissley) Some ugly telephone cabling work, sent in via:

(images via) Nightmare Server Rooms, courtesy TechRepublic:

(images via) Embryo of Transformer (waiting for the touch of AllSpark)? -

(original unknown) Some crazy wiring in Bucharest, Romania:

(sent to DRB by Jej) Something is not right here (found in Japan):

(image via) ------- Really Good Wiring Jobs We have to provide a visual relief to our readers, realizing that they've seen too much nightmarish wiring already. So here are most beautiful wiring jobs - the first of which belongs to the CERN's Hadron Collider:

(images courtesy/copyright CERN) Another good organized switch board, all the way from the times of Cold War - from May 1959 General Dynamics brochure:

(image via) And now, great wiring in fashion: just imagine how it would feel to have a Bad Wiring Day for this model? -

(design by students of the Pontificia Bolivariana University, Colombia; photo by Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images) Great wiring in art? Well, how about this "Wired" sculpture, by Jud Turner:

(art by Jud Turner - "Wired") "Tangled" lamp design, Matthew Booth:

(image credit: Matthew Booth) Troy Paiva, famous for his "Lost America" series of abandoned sites, lights up vintage cable and wiring with cool colours - making "Light Painting" art out of abandoned machinery:

(images credit: Lost America) "Miles of wiring in a junk 60s jet airliner at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard" And here is the Great Wiring: the "Wired" Magazine! -