Friday, November 2, 2007

Mechanical Calculators

I don't know if any of you have found the site oobject.com. Every so often (day? week?) they post a list of objects in some category, which readers can then rank as best/worst or whatever.

Some collections are more interesting than some, but I was fascinated by their collection of 17 mechanical marvel calculators.

My favorites are Babbage's Difference Engine Number 1 and Liebnitz's stepped reckoner. If you have read Neil Stephenson's 3-volume Baroque Cycle, you can see the gold disks that were integral (integral - Hah!) to the plot.

Check out the other lists. There's lots of weird/interesting stuff there.

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