Intuitively you'd think diameter was in there.
The hidden subtlety behind using multifilament steel wire on drawing
tables, to retain parallelism . Once prestretched, the wire is flexible
to go round half inch pulleys ,without work-hardening and breaking, 1mm
solid steel wire would not.
For anyone interested
http://diverse.4mg.com/1924+EZ.jpg
is a 1949 compilation of a few anomalous Southampton tide gauge recordings.
The one of interest is the 1924 one.
The original charts were lost in WW2 bombings.
For the 1924 event, around midnight , not noon, as the compilation plot
would have it
The red overlaid trace is the predicted astronomic tide for that time.
The legend "highest recorded level" is true ie highest recorded level
before the mechanism jammed, end-stop hitting a pulley.
Then someone added the nipple bit and gave it as the height the tide
reached. But in actuality (cross-referenced from comtemporaneous
newspaper reports) is something like the yellow trace, 2 inches above
the ebb slope , 2 inches of slippage, meaning the tid ewas about 1.5
feet higher than what got in the records.
The meteorology record of the time ,also supports something more like
the yellow overlaid trace
The same make of recorder at Dover also crapped out in the same storm event.