Charles Babbage's 5-Ton Calculator Comes to Life May 14, 2008
Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, has added an extremely cool looking 19th-century mechanical calculator to his collection. Charles Babbage was the designer of the 5-ton machine but it was too complex to build in 1849. It does work and it gives you an idea of how advanced and intricate machines would have become if it had not been for computer power. You can learn more about complex difference engine with 8,000 separate parts in this Wired video and article. Wired explains what the machine can do.
It works. The five-ton bronze, steel and cast iron contraption is operated by a crank handle and can calculate the results of elaborate trigonometric and logarithmic functions with 31 digits of precision. What's more, it has a printer which stamps the results of its calculations on paper and on a plaster tray, which could be used to create lead type for printing books of mathematical tables.
