Category: Timeline Stories

In the late 1920s, scientists started talking about developing machine translation technology. Independently and almost simultaneously, in 1929, the Italian Federico Pucci wrote his study on “automatic translator”, then two other scientists created devices for language translation—the Frenchman Georges Artsrouni (1932) and the Russian Pyotr Trojanskii (1933).

Georges Artsrouni was a French scientist of Georgian-Armenian origin. Starting his work on the machine in 1929, he had completed construction by 1932, and on 22 July 1933, he applied for and later got a patent for a “Mechanical brain” (cerveau mécanique), a general-purpose device with many potential applications. Later, he created a second and third version of the machine.

Artsrouni’s mechanical brain was not primarily a calculator but a general-purpose storage device with facilities for retrieving and printing stored information. He suggested applications such as the automatic production of railway timetables, telephone directories, commercial telegraph codes, banking statements, and even anthropometric records. It was claimed to be particularly suitable for cryptography, for deciphering and encrypting messages, and, finally, it was claimed to be a device for translating languages.

At the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1937, the machine attracted much attention, several thousand demonstrations were given, and it received a prize (diplôme de grand prix) in the section for data processing (mécanographie). Many state organizations were impressed by its versatility and entered into provisional contracts with the inventor to develop prototypes designed for their particular requirements. The French post office, for example, wanted a machine for postal cheque accounting; the railway administration envisaged a machine for printing tickets to various destinations; the Ministry of Defence wanted a brain for registering and processing prisoners of war. None of these plans came to fruition after the German occupation of France in 1940, and it meant the end for the mechanical brain.

Initially, Artsrouni saw one of its main applications as a mechanical dictionary for producing crude word-for-word translations. In his 1933 patent description, he stated explicitly that his brain could be adapted for the “translation of a foreign language into one of the three other languages recorded in it”, and that even if “the existing model could operate only on these four languages… the number of languages and the number of words contained in the dictionary for each language could be without limit.”

As a mechanical dictionary, the brain had four basic components: a memory of words in the four languages (bande de réponse), an input device consisting of a keyboard activating a reading head (mécanisme de repérage), a search mechanism (sélecteur), and an output mechanism (mécanisme de sortie) activated in its turn also by the reading head. The four components were driven by a motor, and the whole apparatus was contained in a rectangular box measuring 25x40x21 cm.

The memory was the core of the device. It consisted of a paper band 40 cm wide, which could be up to 40 meters in length, moving over two rolling drums and held in position by perforations on the edges. The dictionary entries were recorded in normal orthographic form (i.e. not coded) line by line in five columns. The first column was for the source language word (or term), and the other columns were for equivalents in other languages and for other useful information. Using a Varityper (a variable-spacing typewriter), the band could contain up to 40000 lines, which could be doubled if both sides of the band were used. For even greater capacity, Artsrouni proposed that entries could be printed in two different colours (red and blue) superimposed on each other on the same lines and read by switching from one to the other by changing filters. Since the machine could use several bands, and since the width of the bands could also be increased, the amount of dictionary information could be infinite, as Artsrouni maintained, it was limited only by the effort required to record the data itself. As a further feature, the device was furnished with a recording mechanism permitting the user to modify the contents of the memory by suppressing some lines and adding others. Such modifications would be easy to make because the sequence of entries could be perfectly arbitrary.

Input, search, and output took place on a board on the top of the machine. At the bottom of the board, nearest the operator, came the input keyboard; immediately above it came a row of lettered cogs to display the search word and at the top, furthest from the operator, came a row of slits for displaying the five columns of a line selected from the memory device. The word (or term) to be found (i.e., translated) was input at the keyboard and, through a linked mechanism, displayed on the row of cogs (the reading head)–apparently up to a maximum of ten letters. Corrections to input could be made by pressing a button to set the reading head to neutral and by inputting again.

The input word was linked to the dictionary memory by the selector search mechanism. This also consisted of a band (paper or metal) rotating on two moving drums. The band contained all the words (terms) that could be selected and searched for, listed in the same order as recorded in the memory; however, in this case, words were coded in the form of perforations.

The selector mechanism locates, via the perforation band, the corresponding word (term) in the memory. The whole line (five columns) was then displayed in the row of five slits at the top of the operator board. These slits represented the output mechanism: the first slit showed the source word and the four others the translations and other information. (The number of slits could be increased to 15 if desired.) The slits were provided with windows of red and blue glass, allowing users to select either blue or red entries. In addition to this visual display of results, the brain could be provided with a printer to obtain typed output. Even more ambitiously, Artsrouni envisaged spoken output using a special mechanism that presumably would have involved pre-recording on a tape.

The translation proceeded in five stages:
– the word to be translated was keyed in, which activated automatic movement of the cogs on the reading head
– the motor set into motion simultaneously the bands of the selector mechanism and the bands of the memory device
– both bands halted when the perforations of the selector matched exactly those indicated by the reading head
– the slits opened automatically and the results of the search were read visually by the operator, or typed out, or produced as sounds
– the sought term was erased, and the same cycle began again for the next term

It was claimed that the selector and the memory could operate at a speed of 60 seconds for 40000 lines. If the search began midway on the band, this speed would be doubled. In fact, a special braking and acceleration device was suggested that could reduce the search of a full band to 10 or 15 seconds, as these speeds applied to the oldest model. In a later model, the friction between the reading head and the selector could be eliminated by the use of cathode lamps for display instead of the mechanical cogs, and the search speed could be further reduced to three seconds.

When he put forward his invention, Artsrouni was not thinking of fully automatic translation and certainly not of high-quality translation. He was no linguist and had no awareness of problems of polysemy, idioms, or syntactic ambiguity. But he did believe that his device could be used for producing quick rough translations. Artsrouni thought that operators could use a telegraphic style for input and output, and a telegraphic language could act as an intermediary language–allowing people who do not know each other’s languages to convey simple messages. It would not replace translators, but it could aid communication. In addition, Artsrouni envisaged a dictionary of phrases rather than words, and thus the possibility of more accurate translations. The problem, of course, would be the size of the memory, the cost of compiling the dictionary, and the slow operating speed.

Biography of Georges Artsrouni

Georges B. Artsrouni (Георгий Арцруни) was born on 10 July 1893 in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia in the Russian Empire. He came from the noble Armenian family of Artsrunids, which played a major political role in Armenia and Byzantium. He grew up in Tiflis, then studied at а Building Higher School in St. Petersburg (interestingly, the other inventor of early translation machine, Pyotr Trojanskii, who is only several months younger than Artsrouni, also studied in St. Petersburg in 1910s, but there is no evidence if the two men knew each other). In 1922, Artsrouni emigrated to France to pursue a career in engineering.
Georges Artsrouni made a family in France and died in Paris on 27 October 1960.

Sources:
Corbé, M. (1960): La machine à traduire française aura bientôt trente ans, Automatisme 5(3): 87-91.
Daumas Maurice: Les machines à traduire de Georges Artsrouni, Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications, tome 18, n°3, 1965. pp. 283-302.

For many centuries, people have been trying to break down the language barrier, to create a common language for all people, to find a way to learn all languages, or to create a technology that allows people to understand foreign languages without wasting time and effort in learning them. The first ideas date back to the 17^th century, when René Descartes (in a letter dated 1629 to Marin Mersenne), Athanasius Kircher (1663, Polygraphia nova treatise), and Gottfried Leibniz (1666, Dissertatio de arte combinatoria treatise) independently proposed a universal language as a new basis for logical thinking and for eliminating the mutual misunderstanding that occurs due to illogical languages.

In 1661 George Dalgarno (1616–1687), a Scottish schoolteacher in Oxford, published the book Ars signorum, vulgo character universalis et lingua philosophica, in which he presented his approach to creating a universal language for scientists and philosophers, which would replace Latin. In 1668, Dalgarno’s friend John Wilkins (1614–1672), an Anglican clergyman, natural philosopher, and author, one of the founders of the Royal Society, published a treatise, “Experience on the true symbolism and philosophical language”, in which he presented a similar idea. However, their proposal did not meet with approval among linguists. Much later, in the late 19^th century, scientists returned to developing a single international language, which led to the creation of Esperanto. However, the first attempts at machine translation were still decades away.

In the late 1920s, scientists started talking about developing machine translation technology. In 1929, the Italian Federico Pucci wrote his study on “automatic translator”. In 1932, Georges Artsrouni, a French engineer, created a machine that could be used as a bilingual automatic dictionary. At the same time, in 1933, the Soviet engineer Pyotr Trojanskii invented “a machine for the automatic production of ready typed translations requiring only literally editing from one language simultaneously into several other languages”. The patent application for the machine was filed on 5 September 1933 (авторское свидетельство СССР № 40995, this was the equivalent of a patent in the USSR, where intellectual property could not become private property, was granted in January 1935).

Trojanskii’s necessarily simple invention was a table with a slanted surface and an old-school film camera combined with a typewriter. The typewriter keys encode morphological and grammatical information, and its ribbon is fed simultaneously with the photographic film. A movable plate of printed words, called the glossary field, was attached to the surface of the device. The words in the glossary field were accompanied by translations into four different languages and arranged like letters on a keyboard: the most frequently used ones were closer to the centre of the field.

Let’s see an excerpt and a drawing (see the upper drawing) from the patent application:
A machine for selecting and typing words when translating from one language into another or several others simultaneously, characterized by a belt (2) provided with columns, with words in different languages pasted on it and furnished with perforations (3) for positioning the required word or words against an aperture in the desk, above which a photographic camera is positioned for recording on a light-sensitive film the basic word with its corgresponding row of words in foreign languages, and, nearby, a typewriter furnished with additional keys for typing on a paper tape conventional signd alongside the photographed word.

Trojanskii saw three stages in mechanical translation:
1. A person-editor who knows the source language converted the words of the sentences into the “basic” form and arranged the syntactic functions of the words to free the input text from the obscurities of the morphological, syntactic, and semantic character.
2. A machine translates these forms and functions into the given language,
3. The received text is edited by a human, bringing the translated text to a correct and pleasant sound.
The inventor proceeded from the fact that in many languages, ​​the order of words in sentences is the same, and therefore, if you translate word for word, the meaning of the sentence can be understood. For every word, its forms were printed, and then the editor had to combine a set of words into a connected text. If there were homographs (words identical in spelling, but different in meaning), then there were such instructions for them:
• Translation (on duty)
• Translation (Essays)
• Translation (arrows)
• Translation (pictures).
The Trojanskii machine’s dictionary field contained 80000 root words (180000 root words in Russian, 200000 in English).
Later, in the 1940s, Trojanskii considered the prospects of creating a powerful translation device based on modern communications technologies. Sadly, the ideas of Trojanskii were deemed useless in the USSR (in 1933, he requested from the USSR Academy of Sciences to discuss this issue with the Academy’s linguists. The scientists were skeptical about the idea: discussions around the project continued for eleven years, after which contact with Troyansky was suddenly lost, and he presumably left Moscow.) and remained unknown even to scholars for a long time, to be rediscovered only in the late 1950s. A detailed description of the works of Trojanskii can be found in a Russian book from 1959 (see Переводная машина Троянского).

Biography of Pyotr Trojanskii

Пётр Петрович Смирнов-Троянский (Pyotr Petrovich Smirnov-Trojanskii) was born in January 1894 into the family of the railway repair shop worker Пётр Троянский in Orenburg, a town in the Southern Urals, a trading station and, since the completion of the Trans-Aral Railway, a prominent railway junction en route to the new Central Asian possessions and to Siberia. The Trojanskii family had fourteen children, and life was hard. Pyotr finished a parish school in Orenburg and passed gymnasia examinations without attending classes, then, he entered the University of St. Petersburg. There, he made his living by giving lessons. A participation in World War I prevented him from finishing university (in 1917, he was mentioned as Прапорщик 105 запаснаго полка Георгиевского войскового собора г. Оренбурга).

After the Great October Revolution of 1917, Pyotr obviously was a supporter of the communist party and entered the Institute of Red Professors. Afterwards, he became an Esperantist (he built a system of coding grammatical information based on the grammar of Esperanto, but it was considered unreliable for political reasons) and taught social sciences and the history of science and technology at several universities. In 1927—1934, he participated in compiling the Technical Encyclopedia (articles for economy), and in 1926—1947, he took part in compiling the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. From the beginning of the 1930s, Trojanskii devoted more and more time to putting into practice his idea of a translating machine. His poor health (he suffered from stenocardia) and a long break because of WWII prevented him from completing the work on mechanising translation, which he considered the cause of his whole life.

Pyotr Petrovich Trojanskii was married twice. In 1917, he married Татьяна Николаева Бехтерова (born 1897), the daughter of a veterinary surgeon. Later, he married Зоя Николаевна Смирнова-Троянская (born 1904), a medical doctor. By the late 1930s, he was calling himself Smirnov-Trojanskii, apparently adopting his wife’s surname. It is under this name that he is often referred to in the literature, particularly outside Russia.

Pyotr Petrovich Trojanskii died on 24 May 1950.

Source:
И. К. Бельская, Д. Ю. Панов, “Перeводная машина П. П. Смирнова-Троянского: сборник материалов о машине для перевода с одного языка на другие, предложенной П.П. Смирновым-Троянским в 1933 г.”, Москва, 1959.

The binary numeral system, used internally by all modern computers, is not new. It was used by the old Egyptians in the 18^th century BC and reinvented at the beginning of the 17^th century in Europe by Thomas Harriot. In the second half of the 17^th century, Leibniz not only created the first mechanical calculator, suitable for addition, subtraction, and multiplication but also dreamed about the logical machine and binary calculator. When the time came for the practical realization of a modern computer around 1930, it seems the first man, who proposed the binary system to be used, was the French polytechnician and researcher—Raymond Louis Andre Valtat (1898-1986).

In the 1920s Valtat studied at École Polytechnique, where he was a student of the famous French mathematician Maurice d’Ocagne (1862-1938), professor, member of the French Academy of Sciences, and rapporteur on all subjects concerning calculus and calculators.

In 1936 d’Ocagne presented to the Academy of Sciences a paper, written by Valtat—Machine à calculer fondée sur l’emploi de la numération binaire, in which he advocated the usage of the binary system in a calculating apparatus in comparison to the decimal system, for instance, that the computation of a square root is straightforward in this system. In his presentation, d’Ocagne noted that Raymond Valtat who, since 1931 owns several patents, is the first person to have proposed using the binary system in mechanical calculators. Interestingly, d’Ocagne recognizes the so-called chessboard calculator described by Napier in 1614, in Raymond Valtat’s project of a binary calculator.

Following the publication of Valtat’s works by Maurice d’Ocagne, another French researcher, Louis Couffignal very quickly reacted and presented his confidential works on using binary numeration in calculating machines.

Raymond Valtat probably started his work on calculating machines in the middle 1920s, and he got several patents related to statistical machines and accounting machines in the late 1920s and 1930s (for example, see US patent 1777947). He turned his attention to binary calculators around 1930 because in 1931 he applied for French (pat. Nr. FR737538) and Switzerland (pat. Nr. CH183498) patents, in which he stated: This invention proposes improvements in or relating to calculating and like apparatus, consisting in providing in the apparatus, devices referred to in this description, as “Codifiers”, used to transform the numbers displayed on the keyboard of ordinary machines in numbers expressed in the binary system, to carry out the operations on the binary numbers and to transform the results back to the usual decimal system, using devices referred to as “Translators”.

After French and Switzerland patents, filed in 1931, in 1932 Valtat applied for patents in Germany (see Patentschrift 664012), Great Britain (410129), and Canada (CA330142). After WWII he continued his work on binary calculators and in 1948 he applied for a USA patent for a Binary Network Type Calculating Machine (see US patent 2620974).

In the British patent, Valtat stated: Calculations are performed by first converting the items, factors, &c. from the decimal system into the binary (or ternary) notation, performing the calculation in this system and then translating the result into the decimal system. The calculating devices may consequently be of a simplified character, the counting elements consisting only of parts occupying an operative position or a non-operative position to represent unity or nought respectively.

In the 1950s Valtat turned his attention and specialized in physics and chemistry, because, in 1960, he founded the Catalyons Laboratory (still existing as a family business, run by his granddaughters), during his research to help his wife who suffered from liver cancer. In this period he got patents for Process for obtaining a solution in a substantially non-electrolyte solvent, Coating elements, Female underwear, a volumetric dosing device, and others.

Source: Napier and binary arithmetics, Michel Mouyssinat

The binary numeral system (or base 2 numerals), is a positional numeral system with a radix of 2. It represents numeric values using two symbols—0 and 1. The advantage of the binary system is that it can represent numbers in systems (mechanisms) capable of being in two mutually exclusive states. This is the reason that the binary system is used internally by all modern computers.

Using the binary system for counting is not a new idea. The ancient Egyptians used for the multiplication of two numbers a procedure today known as peasant multiplication, which basis is the expression of one factor in the binary system. The advantage of this variant of multiplication used in old Egypt already in the 18^th century BC, is that it does not require the knowledge of the whole multiplication table. Pingala, an otherwise-obscure Indian author, wrote about 300 B.C. Chandahsastra, or Science of Meters. In this treatise, the author used a binary logic system (short-long, in this case, rather than 0-1) to explore meter in poetry.

In Europe, it was Thomas Harriot (1560-1621), an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer, linguist, and the founder of the English school of algebra, who rediscovered the binary system around 1604.

With regard to Harriot’s invention of binary, of particular interest is one manuscript (see the nearby image) (there are eight large volumes of Hariot’s manuscripts kept in the British Museum) that contains a record of a weighing experiment at the top, and examples of binary notation and arithmetic at the bottom. Here Harriot sketched a table of the decimal numbers 1 to 16 in binary notation and worked out three examples of multiplication in binary: 109 × 109 = 11881, 13 × 13 = 169, and 13 × 3 = 39.

Yet Harriot was sufficiently intrigued by his new number system to explore it over a further four manuscript pages, working out how to do three of the four basic arithmetic operations (all but division) in binary notation. On one sheet, Harriot wrote examples of binary addition (equivalent to 59 + 119 = 178 and 55 + 114 = 169) and subtraction (equivalent to 178 – 59 = 119 and 169 – 55 = 114) and the same example of multiplication in binary (109 × 109) as above, this time solved in two different ways.

On a different sheet, Harriot converted binary 1101101 to 109, calling the process “reduction,” and then worked through the reciprocal process, called “conversion,” of 109 to 1101101.
Reductio
1101101
64
32
8
4
1
---
109

On yet another sheet, Harriot logged a table of 0 to 16 in binary, a simple binary sum: 100000 + [0]1[00]1[0] = 110010 (in decimal, 32 + 19 = 51), and another example of multiplication, 101 × 111 = 100011 (5 × 7 = 35). On a different sheet, he gave several examples of multiplication in binary (equivalent to 3 × 3 = 9; 7 × 7 = 49; and 45 × 11 = 495) and produced a simple algebraic representation of the first few terms of the powers of 2 geometric sequence.

Unfortunately, despite his great insight, Harriot did not publish any of his work on binary, and his manuscripts remained unpublished until quite recently, being scanned and put online as late as 2012. Although he rightly deserves the accolade of inventing binary many years before Napier‘s chessboard calculator and Leibniz‘s De Progressione Dyadica, Harriot’s work on it remained unknown until 1922, and so did not influence Leibniz or anyone else, nor did it play any part in the adoption of binary as computer arithmetic in the early 1930s.

The Codices of the great Leonardo Da Vinci, who besides his numerous talents, was intrigued by the mechanical devices that were being contrived to fascinate the crowds, contain sketches of the mechanisms of three automatons—let’s call them Automated Cart, Mechanical Lion, and Mechanical Knight. It is known that he was reading classic Greek texts and had a keen desire to reproduce the science of ancient masters like Ctesibius and Heron, and perhaps to outdo them. Leonardo continued and advanced his fascination with ancient Greek science by developing fully animated automata.

Automated Cart

The so-called Automated Cart is the first known automaton of Leonardo. The manuscript Codex Atlanticus (largest collection of Leonardo’s sheets) page f812r (see the nearby image) shows his unique technological advances in automation devices from as early as 1478 when Leonardo, still 26 years old, was engaged as an independent artist in Florence and used to work for the local ruler Lorenzo Medici.

Leonardo’s three-wheeled programmable cart has a wooden frame, that measures about 50×50 cm. The cart’s frame is joined by secure fasteners to protect “any mounted” device from the vibrations as the cart moves through its programmed trajectory. The machine has two large gears and arbalest springs, the source of motive power, each an interdependent subsystem for propulsion and guidance. A rocker arm held in tension by cables connected to the arbalest springs created the escapement to regulate the speed of the gears oscillating back and forth. The left unit was felt to be used for propulsion, whereas the right unit was for guidance systems and automation of mounted pieces. The front wheel drive is a rack-and-pinion mechanism for steering with the possibility of serving as a trigger for “special effects.”

The direction and velocity of Leonardo’s automated cart were controlled by an array of cams attached to the top of the large barrel gears. The left propulsion cams controlled the speed of the cart, perhaps even stopping at programmed intervals, turning, or reversing, all of its own volition.

Mechanical Lion

Sheets 90/v (see the nearby image) and 91/r of Leonardo’s Codex Madrid I include drawings of peculiar mechanisms that show detailed functions of a walking apparatus, which is perhaps derived from a design by Leonardo for the movements of a mechanical lion or another automaton. The upper figure on page 90v (marked with 1) is erased, while the lower (marked 2) presents an improved version of the same device, boldly drawn, labeled, and commented: Quando la corda -n-a- sarà disscesa in -n-e-, il piedi -d- si sarà alzato l’altezza di -h-e-. E quando la corda e sarà pervenuta in -f-, il piedi -d- sarà riabbassato. (When the rope -n-a- has descended to -n-e-, the foot -d- will have risen by the height -h-e-. And when the rope has reached -f-, the foot -d- will have descended again.) The lower drawing shows the mechanism’s functions more clearly, although in contrast to the upper only one drive wheel is drawn. This wheel holds the ends of two ropes on the edge (at two points offset at right angles), both leading via the pulleys to a three-part lever mechanism. When the wheel turns, it pulls the levers together and apart with the band, and the limbs move accordingly.

Accounts at the time show Leonardo may have made three such lions. The first automaton was probably designed at the beginning of 1490s, while Leonardo was under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, and was presented on a royal spectacle for the French King Charles VIII in late 1495, and was later displayed in many public venues including the wedding of Maria de Medici in 1500. A second lion, according to accounts, was somehow self-powered and could walk and move its head. It was presented on 1 July 1509 at the entry of King Louis XII into Milan. The third lion (powered by a counterweight with escapement), a gift from Pope Leone X and the town of Florence to the King of France, Francis I, was taken to Lyon, where on 12 July 1515, at the end of a surprising, magical walk before the King, it stopped, the lion’s body opened and it reared on its hind legs and presented lilies (the fleur de lys is a symbol of French royalty) to the King.

Mechanical Knight

Around 1495, almost at the same time when Leonardo designed his Mechanical Lion, he devised another automaton, the so-called Mechanical Knight. In the 1950s, Italian researcher Carlo Pedretti discovered in the Codex Atlanticus sketches and notes on the Mechanical Knight, with numerous fragmented design details scattered across various pages.

The automaton would have had the outer appearance of a Germanic knight and a complex core of mechanical devices that probably were human-powered. It had two independent operating systems: The first had three degree-of-freedom legs, ankles, knees, and hips; The second had four degrees of freedom in the arms with articulated shoulders, elbows, wrists, and hands. A mechanical analog–programmable controller within the chest provided the power and control for the arms. The legs were powered by an external crank arrangement driving the cable, which connected to key locations near each lower extremity’s joints. The robot’s head has a hinged jaw and is attached to a flexible neck. Drums inside the automaton produce sounds as the rest of the body moves.

The Mechanical Knight appears to have been assembled and displayed for the first time at a ceremony held by the Prince of Milan, Ludovico Sforza in 1495. It doesn’t appear to have made another appearance.

Despite the lack of complete plans, several attempts to reconstruct the Mechanical Knight have been made since its rediscovery in the 1950s. The first real attempt to rebuild the Knight was undertaken by American roboticist Mark Rosheim in 1996 (see the nearby image). This was the first practical demonstration that the automaton worked as planned. Besides that, it appears to follow the laws of proportions and kinetics laid out in Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.

On 18th December 1866, John H. Chidester of Cleveland, Ohio, patented a simple adding device (see US Letters Patent No. 60475), that was quite similar to the earlier machines of his compatriots Jabez Burns and John Ballou.

The Computing Machine of Chidester (see the nearby patent drawing) obviously never went into production, and even the patent model is not preserved to the present time (up to 1880, the US Patent Office required inventors to submit a model with their patent application).

The device has a brass cylindrical case, sections of which are cut out in the direction of its circumference, leaving openings. It has nine number wheels, on one side of which is cut a square recess or groove, and on its periphery thirty square notches, of equal size and of equal distance from each other. These wheels are put on a common shaft and related with springs to eight disks, made to fit closely into the recess or groove of the wheels, but not so closely that they will not easily turn. The wheels are turned by pointed pins, inserted into the notches between the figures, and as the wheels turn, the springs transfer the motion to the disks.

Little is known about the inventor of this calculating machine. John Hinkley Chidester was born in 1821 somewhere in Pennsylvania. He was the son of Lydia Hinkley Chidester (1794-1872) from New York and Silas Chidester from New Jersey. John had an elder sister, Sarah Hall Chidester-Harrington (1820-1904). John Hinkley Chidester died on 23 July 1877 (aged 56) in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and was buried in the local Woodland Cemetery.

At the present time, predictions of tides and tidal currents are generated by computer. The prediction of the periodic tides is the oldest form of oceanic prediction. How were such predictions made before the electronic age?

Ancient civilizations recognized the relationship between the rise and set of the Moon and the rise and fall of the tides. Initially, tide predictions used rule-of-thumb to relate the times of the tides to the rise and set of the Moon. Such techniques indicate that the high tide would occur a certain number of hours after the Moon had passed overhead, or that the low tide had occurred a certain number of hours after the Moon rose or set. However, such methods provide general information which may not be accurate. A more precise, harmonic method of predicting tides was developed in the mid-1800s.

The first scientist to explain how tides are generated by the gravitational forces of the moon and sun was Isaac Newton (in the 1690s). In 1775 Pierre Laplace suggested, that tides should be represented as a series of harmonic oscillations. However, it was the British mathematician, physicist, and engineer William Thomson (later known as Lord Kelvin) who announced, in 1867, that he had developed a method for harmonic analysis and prediction.

The harmonic method of predicting tides is based on the fact that tides are the result of the gravitational forces of the Moon and Sun. The magnitude of these forces is due to the changing positions of the Earth, Moon, and Sun relative to each other. As the gravitational forces change, so do tides. The orbits of the Earth, Moon, and Sun are in constant motion, following repeating patterns of different frequencies that can be observed, analyzed, and predicted.

Some of these are orbiting patterns we are familiar with—the daily rotation of the Earth relative to the Sun (24 hours—a solar day); the rotation of the Earth relative to the Moon (24 hours and 50 minutes—a sidereal day); the orbit of the Moon around the Earth (29.5 days—the changing phases of the Moon); the orbit of the Earth around the Sun (365.25 days—a calendar year). There are many more—some with periods of a few hours, others with periods of months—which are harder to describe and visualize.

Using the timing of these different and periodic changes in the positions of the Earth, Moon, and Sun, scientists analyzed tide observations for changes that occur with the same frequencies. They were able to connect changes in the tides to specific changes in the positions of the Earth, Sun, and Moon, representing them as several sine curves, each with a frequency matching the frequency of one of the periodic motions of the Earth, Sun, and Moon, and with an amplitude equalling the contribution of a particular motion to the tides at a given location.

These “connections” are called “tidal harmonic constituents.” By combining the effect of all the constituents for a location, i.e., by adding and subtracting the various sine curves, the tides at that location can be predicted—for the present but also for dates in the future or in the past to assist in an analysis of past or future events. More than 200 tidal harmonic constituents have been mathematically defined. However, for most locations, many of these constituents have no real effect on the tides and can thus be safely discounted.

Manually adding and subtracting the effects of multiple sine curves is a daunting task. William Thomson made use of the very regular nature of the harmonic constituents to automate tide predictions.

Sine curves have a very well-defined period and amplitude, thus the effects could be mechanically reproduced using a gear, attached pin, and pulley. This developed into a machine made up of dozens of gears and pulleys, each gear designed to have the same period as one of the tidal harmonic constituents. The pin made it possible to set the amplitude of the constituent, while a chain ran over a pulley with a pen attached to it. The gears and pins pulled on the pulley and chain, thus moving the pen and tracing a curve on a roll paper—a curve which was the resulting tide prediction.

The machines built to predict the tides were finely crafted of brass and iron. The first such machine, a kind of analog computer, was built in London (1872) and calculated the tides using 10 harmonic constituents. This machine, designed by Thomson with the collaboration of Edward Roberts (1845-1933, assistant at the Nautical Almanac Office), and craftsman Alexander Légé, who constructed it, used a pen and paper trace to record the predicted tides. Thomson’s older brother, James, a professor of civil engineering at Queen’s College Belfast, designed the disk-globe-and-cylinder integrator that was used for the tidal harmonic analyzer.

In the machine, each of the 10 components was associated with a specific tidal constituent and had its own gearing to set the amplitude. The components were geared together so that their periods were proportional to the periods of the tidal constituents. A single crank turned all of the gears simultaneously, having the effect of summing each of the cosine curves. As the user turned the crank, an ink pen traced the resulting complex curve on a moving roll of paper. The device marked each hour with a small horizontal mark, making a deeper notch each day at noon. Turning the wheel rapidly allowed the user to run a year’s worth of tide readings in about 4 hours.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Daniel Alroy, a round‐faced man with thinning, sandy hair from New York, was responsible for steering Philips, Appel & Walden Co., a successful underwriter of high‐technology stocks, into the fastest growing segment of the computer industry and has proved a good judge of fashions and fads in the past. In the spring of 1972, deeply concerned about the future of the mini‐computer companies, Alroy got into a fight with Intel. He had set out to prove a point that a cheaper simpler computer can be made. Alroy succeeded and his Q1 Corp. became the first company to develop a complete, standalone, microcomputer system, integrated with a screen, keyboard and floppy drives. It was first delivered on 11 December 1972, based on the Intel 8008 processor that was introduced on the market only eight months earlier, in April 1972.

Alroy wanted to build a system with a wider scope of applicability, than existing at the time, so he designed a general-purpose computer, which would:
* Replace a multiplicity of limited-purpose systems
* Perform the functions with greater specificity
* Accomplish both above goals at a lower cost

The first Q1 computer from 1972 was a typewriter design with alphanumerical keyboard (see the nearby image), a single-line 80-character display, 16KB memory (expandable to 64 KB), floppy drives (8″ diskette, a recording medium as used in IBM 3740), and build-in printer. It was very impressive, and aimed to all from accounting to word-processing machines, to scientific calculators. The Q1 system software included: PL/1 high-level programming language and MACRO assembler (programming tools), Disk Operating System (command interpreter), Editor (ASCII-files processing), Trace Routine (a debugging tool), Sort Routine, Print Routine, Disk Dump, Join Routine, and Function Library.

In 1973, Alroy met Heinz Nixdorf, the president of Nixdorf Computer Company of Paderborn, Germany. Following that meeting, Q1 Corporation received ten monthly payments of $40,000 from Nixdorf Computer in exchange for a sale of know-how. The income from the know-how sale expedited the development of the 8080-based Q1 microcomputer system, named Q1/Lite. In April 1974, Intel introduced a second-generation 8-bit microprocessor, the 8080. That month, Q1 shipped a pre-production unit of its 8080-based microcomputer system, on loan and with a buy option, to the Israeli Air Force. In June 1974, Q1 received a follow-up order for a number of 8080-based systems, which were subject to acceptance tests. The first two 8080-based systems were delivered in August 1974, and the pre-production unit was returned to Q1.

The Q1/Lite was an improved multi-purpose system (see Q1 Sales Brochure), which can be used as a terminal for mainframe computers, for data entry, engineering, word processing, etc. In 1974, Computer Science Corporation made a study of microcomputer systems for NASA. Based on the recommendation, the Q1/Lite computer systems were installed in all eleven NASA bases. Later Q1 Co. put into production third generation of the Q1 system, which used the Z80 processor, and fourth generation, using a 68000 CPU.

In 1979, the National Enterprise Board, an entity of the British Government, invested $11.5 million in a joint venture with Q1 Corporation. Alroy used the opportune moment to install a president in his place, and in 1981 resigned and returned to his interest in the relation of mind and brain. He even wrote a book with his thoughts, The New Foundation of Knowledge.

Source: The Advent of the Microcomputer Era: An Eyewitness Account, © 2017 Daniel Alroy.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, the Austrian engineer and businessman from Innsbruck Alois Salcher devised and produced a fascinating calculating machine. Despite its original construction, the machine of Salcher was never much of a success, and it is rare today. The known serial numbers indicate a production run of about 400 machines, and despite production being stopped since 1908, it was still advertised and sold by the end of 1910.

Salcher got patents for his calculating machine, the so-called ADSUMUDI (after ADdition, SUbtraction, MUltiplication, DIvision), in several countries—Austria (patent AT35115 from 16 Sep 1906), Germany (DE204333 and DE209009), Great Britain (GB190623173 and GB190906657), France (FR370829), and the United States (US974006). Salcher shared two of the patents with Nikolaus Werle, a merchant from Stuttgart. Some patents (e.g. the American one) are for an improved machine, in which the entire principle of operation has been changed, and that has obviously never been manufactured. ADSUMUDI was produced in Germany by the machine factory of Carl Werner of Villingen (the factory had a branch in Innsbruck), one of the largest watch manufacturers in Germany.  It was a messing device with dimensions 39x30x12 cm, and a weight of 12.4 kg.

The operating principle of this 10-positional calculating machine is quite different from any other mechanical calculator ever manufactured. To move the gears with the result wheels attached to them, it has rectangular plates with a slot in the middle and a gear rack on either side of the slot. Depending on which way the result register moves, the gear engages with the rack on the left or the right of the slot, thus reversing the direction of the result register from addition to subtraction and vice versa. The racks are connected to the spring-loaded setting levers so as soon as they are released, they re-zero themselves and transfer their value to the result. All the rest of the complicated mechanism is designed to engage and disengage the correct side of the rack with the result at the correct time, and to make sure the result register is locked when it is not in engagement with the racks.

ADSUMUDI was suitable mainly for addition and subtraction. The name, however, indicates that the machine would also be able to do multiplication and division, and for this, an extra tool is needed, namely a template for repeating the setting of numbers in the input. This takes the form of a sliding carriage, which sits on vertical rails and can be coupled to the operating lever so that every time the carriage slides up, the number is added or subtracted, and every time the carriage slides down, the number is reset into the input. In addition, this carriage can also slide to the left and to the right, to allow for column shifting in multiplication or division. In this respect, the ADSUMUDI is similar to Stanhope‘s four-species calculating machine from 1775.

Sadly, the ADSUMUDI lacked a revolution counter-register, and the operator needed to count the number of repeated additions or subtractions in a multiplication or division and write them down digit by digit. This is obviously tiresome, requires concentration, and much reduces the automation of machine calculation. The machine remained insignificant on the market and can be viewed as a cleverly extended adding machine. The multiplication process takes place at great speed, but the lack of a revolution counter meant that this not-very-cheap machine could not compete with real four-species calculating machines.

Biography of Alois Salcher

Alois Salcher was an engineer and businessman from Innsbruck, Tyrol. He was the owner of Innsbrucker Dampf-Teigwarenfabrik (pasta factory), had a machine workshop, and was engaged in the real estate business. Salcher was a fan of technical novelties and in 1896 he demonstrated the first automobile in Innsbruck.

In the middle 1890s, Alois Salcher married Emilie Hruschka-Salcher (1870-1930), the daughter of the local dentist Josef Hruschka (1843-1913). The Hruschka family, originally from Moravia, was a famous Austrian family of dentists, and Emilie Hruschka became the first female dentist in Tyrol and Austria. Alois and Emilie had two sons—Alois and Hubert (born 1 Jan 1905), who became doctors and Nazi party members and served in the army during WWII.

Besides the above-mentioned patents for calculating machines, Alois Salcher has one more patent—for Bundle seals for barrels (pat. №DE100118 from 1897).

On 5 February 1893, Josef Uržidil (1854-1922), a railway engineer from Žižkov, a small town in the vicinity of Prague, Austro-Hungarian Empire, received a German patent Nr. 70752 (see DE70752) for Additionsmaschine. The adding machine of Uržidil was a key-operated device with a calculating disc. Besides the granted patent, nothing is known about this device, so most probably it remained only on paper, nevertheless let’s examine the adding machine of Josef Uržidil, using the patent application.

The subject of the invention is an addition machine that is suitable for adding a large number of single-digit numbers. Essentially, this machine consists of a toothed wheel R (see the nearby patent drawing), driven by a spiral spring F, which is held by a pawl i and only rotated when one of the pushbuttons marked with numbers is pressed, the associated pressure lever a connected to this forming a frame b, on which the pawl i is attached, depresses, with which the spiral spring F driving the gear R comes into effect and moves the wheel. A lever e plugged onto pin c through a sleeve d, which can also be rotated about the pin f in the vertical direction, and which has an opening g on the end facing frame b, through which the frame b associated bent rod h is inserted, serves to stop the gear R. It is namely when pressing down the frame b, the lever e is pressed into the teeth of the wheel R, which also takes part in the movement of the wheel. But now this lever e strikes the depressed pressure lever and stops the gear wheel R.

If the pressure lever in question is released, the pawl first jumps into the teeth of the wheel R, and the changed position of the wheel is thus fixed. At the same moment, the lever e comes out of the teeth of the wheel R and is driven back by a leaf spring j mounted on the dial in the direction of arrow 1 (Fig. 2), until it strikes a screw k located in the frame b and is stopped there.

All pressure levers a, each of which only belongs to one digit, can be rotated about the pin l, which forms the pin of the lever; the pushbuttons 1, 2, 3,… (see Fig. 7), which are denoted by the first nine digits, protrude from the upper cover plate m (Fig. 1 and 2) and are screwed into these levers. On the lower side of each pressure lever, a leaf spring n is screwed, which has the purpose of snapping the depressed pressure lever back into its original position when the pressure on the button ceases, these levers being held by a fixed plate 0.

The frame b (see Fig. 5) can be rotated about the pin p and is pressed by the leaf springs qq against the adjusting screws introduced in plate 0 (Fig. 2). The pawl i (see Fig. 4 on an enlarged scale) can be rotated about the pin s in the direction of the arrow. The rotation in the other direction is prevented by an attachment t belonging to the frame b, against which a leaf spring u of the pawl also presses.

Biography of Josef Uržidil

Josef Uržidil was born on 7 January 1854, in the village of Šipín, part of Konstantinovy Lázně in the Tachov District of Plzeň Region (or in Ošelín, Stříbro), to a German-Bohemian family. His father, Johann Nepomuk Uržidil (1813–1894) was a rural teacher in West Bohemia, who eventually worked as a head teacher in Bor u Tachov, and also wrote textbooks on arithmetic, national studies, and grammar, played the organ and the violin. His mother Barbara Heinl (1814–1900) from Weseritz (Bezdružice), a town in the Tachov District in the Plzeň Region, was born to a German-speaking Czech family. Joseph was named after his paternal grandfather Josef, who was a farmer in Holýšov, while his other grandfather Wenzel Heinl, the father of his mother Barbara, was a surgeon and worked as a doctor and obstetrician in Bezdružice.

In 1895 Josef Uržidil married in Prague to Elisabeth (Elise, Elsa) Metzelesová, a widow of Jewish origin (born 1854 in Prague, she was previously married to Bernhard Steinitz (1850–1892), a merchant and half-brother of the great chess master Wilhelm Steinitz), who from the first marriage had already brought seven children. Their only common son, Johann Nepomuk Josef Adolf, was born on 3 February 1896, in their apartment at Krakovská Street No. 30/3 (Prague II). Johann (Johannes) Uržidil (see the nearby photo from 1897) became a famous German-Bohemian writer, poet, and historian. Elise died on 7 January 1900. On 29 May 1904, Josef married for the second time, to Marie-Anna Mostbeck(ová), a Czech from Nymburk (b. 1864).

Josef Uržidil was an engineer, who worked many years as a clerk and senior inspector of State Railways of West Bohemia and Prague.

In the spring of 1922, Josef’s son Johannes ​​bought a house for his father in Bezdružice near Konstantinovy ​​Lázní, the home district of Josef. On 24 December 1922, Josef Uržidil died there.