The EVA Pod Hand Controllers

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A controlling hand

One fascinating detail about the EVA pod interior set is that it contains a pair of complex controller devices, shaped like blocky and stylized human hands, mounted on the dashboard. Fascinating because they appear well ahead of their time in terms of their industrial design.

The same hand controllers were used in the cockpits of the Orion III clipper, the Aries 1B shuttle, and the moon bus, though it's hard to make out any details since they're generally in shadow and have pilots’ hands over them. These other vehicles also have vertical joysticks, apparently taken from de Havilland Vampire military aircraft, along with the hand controllers. The Discovery seems to be the only craft in the film not to boast any hand controls, presumably because it was an enormous vessel directly controlled by HAL, and not piloted by humans like an aircraft.

The Hand Controllers

The controllers are black hand-shaped devices mounted on narrow rectangular stems. The stems rise from hemispherical protrusions, suggesting that they're 2D input devices capable of moving in any direction on a plane. But interestingly the hemispheres also have slots into them, which would constrain stem movement in the sphere to forward and back.

You can see the actors moving the EVA pod controllers as they leave the pod bay, suggesting that they're meant to portray basic throttles, used to command forward and reverse movement of the vehicle. But you also see the Orion and Aries pilots' hands seemingly drift side to side as well.

But there's a lot more going on with these hand-shaped controllers than simple accelerate and decelerate. The hands have hinges at the stems, so they can also tilt up and down. They have a large trapezoidal button on the top, which is clearly meant to be a dead man's switch that releases when nobody has a hand on it. There's a thumb pushbutton, and a set of four finger buttons on the front edge. And then there are three square pushbuttons, rather more difficult to reach, on the front underside.

In his March 1970 article in Spaceflight magazine, Frederick Ordway says:

Manual (flying) controls were considered necessary both as a stand-by and for local manoeuvres. Two hand control sticks, each with two degrees of freedom and fitted with twist grips, provide the necessary control about six axes.

Particularly interesting to me is that there's a vertical disc between the index finger and middle finger. A fairly large one that sticks out and up quite a bit. The underside or back of the disc is not visible in any photo that I've seen, but various photos from the side and front clearly indicate that the protruding bit is circular. Now, what was this?

Was it nothing more than a fixed separator device, used for keeping the first two fingers apart? Or was it actually... a scroll wheel, like on a post-1990s PC mouse? The latter would be fascinating if so, since it'd predate commercial scroll wheels by decades. In fact the movie is roughly contemporaneous with the whole idea of a mouse as a pointing device. The first computer mouse was designed by Doug Engelbart and built by Bill English at SRI (Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, USA) in 1964 and patented in 1967.

Anyway. Scroll wheel or not, the spaceship controllers seem to be quite a complex multifunction design, much like a modern mouse used by video game players. Only they date back to the mid 1960s, when the film was made!

And capping off the interesting details, the wedge-shaped section at the back has black leatherette applied to it. Which in itself isn't particularly interesting, but photos in the Kubrick Archives show that the leatherette and the back of the hinge are really worn. There are white marks and general wear that you would not expect to see from a week or two of filming in a studio, especially with usually gloved actors. (the wear is not visible in the film or published photos) So that got me wondering.

Were they real things?

We know that the EVA pod interior panels weren't built by movie set construction teams at EMI Elstree. They were actually subcontracted and built by British aerospace company Hawker-Siddeley (makers of the Harrier jump jet), based on 2001 designer Harry Lange's designs.

And now, for some conjecture. Is it possible that the controllers were existing objects made by the company, rather than movie prop designs from Lange's desk? In other words, were they perhaps prototype devices, developed for researching Hawker-Siddeley's advanced aerospace projects, and simply loaned out to the 2001 production team?

I'm not saying that I think they were actual functioning devices capable of controlling a vehicle, since that seems unlikely, but were they physical mockups, constructed to test out advanced user interface ideas? I've never seen any photos of such devices out there.

If they were actual research prototypes, does that mean that they incredibly advanced and insightful designs, dropped by the British firm, only for American computer companies to pick up the user input ball and run with them years later? Or were they developmental dead-ends, with modern input devices simply examples of parallel evolution?

But the argument against this theory is that planning drawings exist showing the hand controllers in one of the non-EVA pod cockpits, suggesting that they were designed and built by the 2001 production team.

Note that these hand controllers are narratively not supposed to control the arms and claws on the outside of the pod. Those were controlled by the large cylindrical controllers located under the front console.

Waldo controllers

The “waldo” controllers looked more or less like this, though unlike my simple rendering they were tilted up slightly and slung under the dash. (the term “waldo” may not have been used by the 2001 production, but is a general term for a remote manipulator device, derived from a 1942 short story by Robert A. Heinlein)

The main cylinders were metal of an unusual (for the movie) champagne gold colour, though it's hard to tell that detail in the film since most of the interior lighting was red. The flat disc with the finger holes was aluminium, and the blank quadrant had a yellow sticker on it with boilerplate nonsense text. For example:

(A) Ensure dine enf top at A0.2
(B) Turn braser to ‘S.S'. POS.

(A) Check PROC 204 responses
(B) Disconnect POWER FD’S (Y)

Photos in the Kubrick Archives show that behind the gold cylinders were trapezoidal boxes with small holes that might have contained lights, but none are ever lit. There was a hole in the centre behind the aluminium disc, and one photo shows a box structure beneath the cylinder, though only the lower edge is visible. The black handles were somewhat shiny, and closeup photos in the Archives reveal a subtle fine-grained leather texture. The blue squares were standard 2001 illuminated pushbuttons, labelled LOCK RELEASE in white (with the text MAIN REF 298 / D USAA MAN OP 39 printed beneath them).

It's not entirely clear how these cylinders were supposed to control the arms, dual hands, and dual claws, but Keir Dullea as Dave Bowman is shown pretending to operate one when using the remote arms to open the Discovery's airlock door.

Frederick Ordway, in his article in the March 1970 issue of Spaceflight magazine, describes these controllers as follows:

(b) Mechanical Hand Controls

Selection controls were placed on each side so that the appropriate hand must be removed from the manipulator to select a tool or to park. Selection of a tool returns the arm to the 'park' position, where it leaves the 'hand', then the arm goes to the appropriate tool and plugs in. In doing so, it inhibits the 'finger' controls on the manipulator so that when the operator returns his hand into the glove he can only move a solid object, not individual fingers.

I'm honestly not entirely sure what he meant by that. Where were these arm tools located?

Anyway, the design definitely looks like it's patterned directly after the “Adelbert” remote manipulator designed in the late 1940s by American engineer Arthur Youmans. Here's a drawing from his US patent application, and a photo of the manipulator controller from the October 1951 issue of Popular Mechanics. Thanks to Reuben Hoggett's Cybernetic Zoo for first publishing this finding.

The square red thing is a detail situated on the cockpit wall between the cylinders. It consisted of a random bunch of greeblies, mostly painted the same shade of oxblood or brick red as the pod interior. It looks a bit fake since it's oddly situated, has nothing around it, and isn't connected to anything by cables or pipes or whatnot. It's what I consider a somewhat unmotivated prop. However, this detail can't be seen in the finished film – it’s only visible in behind the scenes photographs, specifically the 4"x5" colour transparencies taken by set photographer Keith Hamshere and held today by the Kubrick Archives.

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