Your slide rule was invented around 1620-1630, shortly after the publication of the very idea of the logarithm . It is a hand-operated analog computer pertaining to doing multiplication and division. As slide rule development progressed, included scales provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes and dice roots, as well as transcendental functions such as logarithms along with exponentials, circular and hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions . Aviation is just about the few fields where slide rules are still in widespread employ, particularly for solving time-distance problems in light aircraft. To save space and for easier reading, these are typically circular devices rather than the basic linear slide rule shape. A popular example is the E6B .
Inside 1770s Pierre Jaquet-Droz , a Swiss watchmaker , built a mechanical doll (automata ) that can write holding a quill pen. By switching the number along with order of its internal wheels different letters, and hence distinct messages, could be produced. In effect, it could be mechanically "programmed" you just read instructions. Along with two other complex machines, the doll is a the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire of Neuchâtel , Switzerland , nevertheless operates. [14]
The tide-predicting machine invented by Sir William Thomson in 1872 was of great utility for you to navigation in shallow waters. It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide levels for the set period at a particular location.
The differential analyser , a mechanical analog computer meant to solve differential equations by integration , used wheel-and-disc mechanisms to complete the integration. In 1876 Lord Kelvin had already mentioned the possible construction of such calculators, but he had been stymied with the limited output torque of the ball-and-disk integrators . [15] In a very differential analyzer, the output of one integrator drove the input in the next integrator, or a graphing output. The torque amplifier was the advance that allowed these machines to function. Starting in the 1920s, Vannevar Bush and others designed mechanical differential analyzers.