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.

Comments

Oh, fantasitc...

[houstonbofh]

Now OpenBSD if going to need to buy more old hardware to support builds...

Re:Oh, fantasitc...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Luckily, VMS runs on it natively.

Re:Oh, fantasitc...

[houstonbofh]

Not Funny, Bozo.

Damn right. The VMS was a port. Natively it runs RSTS/e!

Re:100 Year old

[ChrisSlicks]

The machine was designed in the late 19th century (1897) and a working prototype was built. This particular machine was from 1914.

"Computer"

[vikingpower]

"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.

Re:"Computer"

[calidoscope]

Michelson did a lot of work on measuring the speed of light, one of the last measurements he did involved a mile long vacuum chamber. As with many experimental physicists, he had to be an accomplished engineer as well in order to conduct his experiments.

Re:"Computer"

[Teancum]

While partially true, there were a great many mechanical analog computers which did a great many things and were widespread in the early 20th Century... including when this particular machine was made.

A good video that shows how some of those mechanical computers were made can be found in this U.S. Navy training film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4

Computers like this were used as early as the Spanish-American War and the Crimean War. A much older computer was found in the form of the Antikythera mechanism.

Yes, there were also people who were called computers as a job title as well, but the mechanical variety existed as well before ENIAC, and were commonly used as well.

Re:"Computer"

[vikingpower]

I checked that in vol. 3 of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, my proudest material possession. You are right. Up to at least the 1850s, as supported by the extensive corpus of citations in the OED, "computer" meant "a person performing computations". The first solidly documented occurrence of the word as "machine performing computations" is from 1897; from 1915 on, the word is only found in this sense, i.e. the sense of "person performing computations" has then fully disappeared, in a period of only 18 years.

Interesting. You made me discover something I did not know. Thanks.

Re:Only 1 of 4 videos is up.

[Animats]

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.

Mind blown

[Puff_Of_Hot_Air]

There are times when I do things that I think are pretty smart, and then I see something like this and am humbled. It staggers the imagination to envisage how this Albert fellow was able to design this incredible machine. It's marvellous to watch, and beautiful in its operation. This is how Fourier analysis should be taught! Nothing has brought it more alive for me than watching this documentary. I desperately want one; I don't think I've ever seen a machine more beautiful.

Re:Mind blown

[hey!]

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.

Re:Mind blown

[bjs555]

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?

Mechanical computers are awesome

[caseih]

Wow, that was an amazing set of videos. Particularly how the machine can do decomposition. What a brilliant man who designed this machine.

All analog computers fascinate me. Apparently analog computers implemented fire control on navy ships for many years, compensating for the speed, direction, and roll of the ship in order to aim guns. The accuracy of such a system was impressive, and they were used up until the 1980s on some older ships. Digital systems simply couldn't get the accuracy for many years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Slide rules are very cool as well. I want to learn how to use one.

Re:Mechanical computers are awesome

[techno-vampire]

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.

Re:Only 1 of 4 videos is up.

[ColdWetDog]

Ah yes, this thing. Saw one (perhaps a copy) when I was a kid. Totally amazing what you can do with gears and math.

Gives me an idea...

[TropicalCoder]

Step 1.) Put a motor on the crank. Step 2.) Read the output into your computer with an optical mouse in place of the pen. Step 3.) Figure out a way to automate programming of the input. Step 4.) Sell it as a coprocessor! Step 5.) Profit!

Re:Misleading

[Garridan]

No no, the presence of a brass gear is all that is necessary to make something steampunk. The Antikythera mechanism is just as steampunk as a rolex watch or a hat with a gear hot-glued to it, which are much more steampunk than a steam locomotive since they produce way too much torque to transmit through brass years. Don't you know anything?

Re:great video series!

[jnork]

You may be thinking of James Burke and his series Connections. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...