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Real Steampunk Computer Brought Back To Life
New submitter engineerguy writes We discovered a 100 year old 19th century computer that does Fourier analysis with just gears spring and levers. It was locked in a glass case at the University of Illinois Department of Mathematics. We rebuilt a small part of the machine and then for two years thoroughly photographed and filmed every part part of the machine and its operation. The results of this labor of love are in the video series (short documentary), which is 22 minutes long and contains stunning footage of the machine in action — including detailed descriptions of how it operates. The photos are collected in a free book (PDF). The computer was designed by Albert Michelson, who was famous for the Michelson-Morley experiment; he was also the first American to win a Nobel Prize in physics.
"Computer", actually, has the meaning: "Machine that performs computations". In that sense, this contraption truly is a computer. It probably only has a memory size of only a few bytes, in modern terms, and can only do a few FLopS also. Yet, it is a computer, in all senses of the word.
Funny. I always thought of Michelson as of one of the two guys involved in the "failed" mirror experiments that allowed A. Einstein to come up with the theory of Special Relativity. Not so, it turns out now: the guy was an accomplished engineer. How great.
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Oh, good, the other videos are up now. So that's how the machine is used for analysis.
This is very similar to the Great Brass Brain, a tide prediction engine.
Ah yes, this thing. Saw one (perhaps a copy) when I was a kid. Totally amazing what you can do with gears and math.
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Fourier analysis was first developed in the 1800's. It took 80 years for the first programmable mechanical hardware to appear in the form of weaving looms in the 1880's. Then the development of mechanical analysis systems like this happened another 20 or 30 years later. Another 70 years, and we can play music on our home PC's and see funky animated digitial audio equalizers.
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Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Back when I was in the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club in '72, our ship carried a 5"/54 gun, which was aimed using a mechanical analog computer. I know that the Iowa Class Battleships all used mechanical fire control both because it was more than accurate enough for the job and because it was specifically designed to ignore the shocks caused by firing the main battery, as well as the bigger shocks caused by incoming shells, bombs and torpedoes.
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I was in the last cadre of high school student to learn the slide rule. I did trig and math problems on a Picket N800, although later I preferred a circular Scientific Instrumentys 300B.
The idea of building a machine to perform mechanical analog computation is not so outside the box for anyone who's ever done analog computation by hand. A repetitive series of calculations boil down to a repetitve sequence of movements, and in particular if you used a circular slide rule the idea of some kind of gear train to do the calculation woudl have been obvious.
Which is not to say the devices weren't ingenious. But except for the abacus and the adding machine, analog contraptions were the only way to do computation other than by handwriting.
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Playing with a slide rule is like saying after sex, "I haven't had this much fun since I first encountered logarithms." In my case, I'd have to sadly admit that I've had more fun quantity wise with logarithms. Seriously, though, I too was in school at the time of the slide rule's demise. They were interesting to use. I recall using electronic analog computers at about the same time. They consisted of a patch board and a number of op amp differentiators, integrators, and gain blocks. You could use the patch cords to model a differential equation with the op amps and then apply power to get an answer as a voltage output. Are things like that still used?