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Technology Hardware

1935 Meccano "Dam Busters" Computer Restored 175

Posted by kdawson from the differential-analyzer dept.
rob1959 writes "A 1935 analog computer, built at Cambridge University and used to help plan the Dam Busters attacks on the Ruhr hydro dams in World War II, has been restored and put on display at Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology. The computer came to NZ around 1950 and was used, ironically, to build hydro dams there — and to calculate rabbit population numbers."
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1935 Meccano "Dam Busters" Computer Restored More

1935 Meccano "Dam Busters" Computer Restored

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  • Grandaddy rulez (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:11AM (#19874907)
    gR4NP4 W45 4 l337 H4x0R, 0Wn3d 7H023 N421 m0F05 l0L.

  • Rabbits? (Score:3, Funny)

    by lordperditor ( 648289 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:12AM (#19874913)
    Would of thought they needed the sheep population controlled more than the rabbits...

    • Re:Rabbits? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Silver Sloth ( 770927 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:16AM (#19874951)
      That just shows that you don't understand about rabbits - one of the major plagues down under. I'm not sure if it's as bad in NZ as it is in Australia but it's far from trivial.

      • Re:Rabbits? (Score:4, Informative)

        by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:23AM (#19874995) Homepage Journal

        rabbits - one of the major plagues down under

        A woman about 20 years older than me told how her dad took the family on a holiday to Adelaide when she was a kid. All the way there and back (to Melbourne) they had to stop every 50 miles to scrape the rabbit carcases out of the wheel bays.

        • Re:Rabbits? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Sponge Bath ( 413667 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @09:36AM (#19875495)

          ...scrape the rabbit carcases out of the wheel bays

          Is this the Australian equivalent of walking to school through the snow, uphill both ways?

        • I saw a rabbit plague in Robe S.A. I was also a kid holidaying with the family (in the late 60's), at night the road was "alive", during the day people were carting them away in ute's and trailers.

          Speaking of the 60's, I also had a large 1940-50ish meccano set with a clockwork motor that I inherited from my dad's mis-spent youth as a buding mechanical engineer. Make your own gyroscope, clockwork robot, grandfather clock (I said it was a large set)...and IIRC it also had instructions for something with a

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by CmdrGravy ( 645153 )
        They should just introduce foxes to Australia, foxes eat rabbits - problem solved, what could possibly go wrong.

        Or cats can eat rabbits too if they're hungry enough so maybe increasing the cat population in rabbit infested areas would help.
        • I recommend wave after wave of needle snakes. Then gorillas.
      • I'm not sure if it's as bad in NZ as it is in Australia but it's far from trivial..

        In the lower half of the South Island, it's bad.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Baumi ( 148744 )
      Actually, they could have used the same technique as with the dams:

      - Deploy skipping bomb.
      - Rabbit sees bomb skipping, gets horny.
      - Rabbit attempts to mate with bomb.
      - BOOM!

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No, the kiwis are quite happy with the sheep population ever since they discovered a fabulous new benefit - it seems apart from the obvious use, you can get meat and wool from them as well.
    • The sheep population is controlled by the fact that people eat them. Unfortunately nothing in Australia or NZ eats rabbits.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gkhan1 ( 886823 )
      I found this note very interesting. I wonder if the calculations had anything to do with Fibonacci numbers? That's the first problem they were used to solve, Fibonacci modeled an abstract population of rabbits using them. That would be so cool, if one of the most important sequences in mathematics were used 800 years after it was discovered in one of the first computers ever, for the same purpose of analyzing rabbits.
    • Is that Would of Thought someone like Conan of Cimmeria?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by mrsym0r ( 1068436 )
      we know exactly how many sheep we have here in New Zealand, just the same as everyone else in the world knows how many lovers they have too.

  • Call me off-topic but (Score:5, Informative)

    by Silver Sloth ( 770927 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:20AM (#19874977)
    TFA also mentions the recent sad death of Donald Michie [wikipedia.org] - a major force in early British computing. I had the honour of working with him on 'Freddy' the robot back in 1973 - back when the UK led the world in robotics.

    • Re:Call me off-topic but (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tiluki ( 74844 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:53AM (#19875183)

      Yes, a very sad loss. I was not sure anyone (surprisingly) on Slashdot picked this up.

      I was privileged to attend his final talk the week before, given at Edinburgh. The video is now actually available here (for a while): http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/jamboree/2007/ [ed.ac.uk]

      This was absolutely fascinating, and I listened spellbound for an hour and a half. Do not be misled by the title as it covered much of the early development of AI in Britain (not just at Edinburgh). Analogous with the actual topic of this story, it details another, very early "physical computer" MENACE - constructed of matchboxes and beads.

      A fuller obituary (that goes way beyond his short involvement with Turing) is here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituarie s/article2061886.ece [timesonline.co.uk]

      Truly a great pioneer and inspiration for us modern researchers in AI.

  • I knew virtually nothing about this... (Score:3, Informative)

    by gardyloo ( 512791 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:21AM (#19874981)
    I'd heard of the famous skipping bombs, and knew basically how they worked. But I'd never heard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise [wikipedia.org], nor the book (or movie) "The Dam Busters". Additionally, it seems that Robert Jackson will produce a remake of the 1954 movie. Most fascinating to me, though, is this Meccano computer. Those engineers were brilliant.

    • Re:I knew virtually nothing about this... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:30AM (#19875031) Homepage Journal

      the book (or movie) "The Dam Busters".

      I read the book years ago. In it the designers built a tank and used marbles as scale model bombs. It doesn't say anything about a computer used in the design. I wonder if information about the computer was left out for reasons of security.

      • It's more likely they left it out simply because such computing machinery was part of the 'assumed background'. (I.E. a detail it never occurred to them to specify, because the detail was so common.) Specialized calculating machinery was hardly unknown in the 1940's, even if the general public was only dimly aware of what IBM (and others) did.

        In the same vein you find multiple mentions of the use of the (exciting, new, and unusual) ENIAC in the development of the H-bomb, but very few mentions of
    • I bet they write out the dog in the new film, they cut him out of the 1954 film every time it's shown on TV, poor dog, it's not his fault he was called Nigger.
    • well, many people were introduced to the "dam busters" movie by pink floyd's "the wall".
    • I knew it from my old Speccy (ZX Spectrum) game [worldofspectrum.org] with the same name.
    • I would say that every Englishman is well acquainted with the work of Barnes Wallis and the famous Dambusters squadron.

      I learnt when I was still a boy from my grandfather ( who was a spitfire pilot during the war ) whilst skimming stones and for everyone else there is the film Dambusters which is shown every Christmas and at periodic intervals throughout the year.
  • Our R&D Department had a no. 10 Meccano set till it was stolen. I guess at today's valuation that theft would have resulted in a police investigation.

    In fact it was last really used in anger to build a remote control to perform a one off dangerous operation safely, and its loss probably cost the company a lot of money when POC models had to be engineered expensively by local contractors instead of being built quickly and cheaply by an engineer in house.

    So RIP real Meccano. Doing FEA on a workstation jus

  • Dam Buster Sucked! (Score:5, Informative)

    by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:33AM (#19875051) Homepage
    Historically, the attack served no real purpose, and the main victim was Ukrainian POWs. Quoting Wikipedia:

    Operation Chastise did not have the military effect that was at the time believed. By 27 June, full water output was restored, thanks to an emergency pumping scheme inaugurated only the previous year, and the electricity grid was again producing power at full capacity. The raid proved to be costly in lives (more than half the lives lost belonging to allied POWs), but in fact no more than a minor inconvenience to the Ruhr's industrial output.

    In his book Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer expressed puzzlement at the raids; destruction of one of the dams served no purpose at all, he claimed, and the failure to follow up with additional raids represented a major lost opportunity for the Allies.

    • Re:Dam Buster Sucked! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16, 2007 @08:43AM (#19875093)
      Historically the attack had a significant purpose, although generally lost on many. Quoting the minor footnote in the same wikipedia article:

      "An important reason for planning the raid was to persuade Stalin that Britain was capable of being an effective ally ... The Dams Raid enabled Churchill, in negotiations with the leaders of these new allies, to point to an effective strike against the hitherto apparently invincible German state so that he was taken more seriously as an ally than might otherwise have been the case. This was relevant vis-à-vis Stalin but also in the USA. Although Churchill had the sympathetic ear of Roosevelt, many of the US military staff had until then been less persuaded of the value of British experience and capabilities.[6]"

      • In other words, millions of pounds were wasted and many lives lost, just to give some politician bragging rights.

        • Re:Dam Buster Sucked! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by igb ( 28052 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @09:14AM (#19875323)
          Well, on the assumption that you're an American, one might say ``just like your President''. But in that, the problem of Stalin's anger about the lack of a second front was a major political issue, and the consequences for Britain had there been no demonstration of good faith with the Russians during 1943 would have been serious. The Russian Army was, indeed, taking most of the brunt of the second world war at that point, in a town on the Volga.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by vrai ( 521708 )
          Churchill's job was to win the war and ensure that the British interests were treated favourably in the aftermath; while Operation Chastise didn't do much for the former it was a helpful boost of towards achieving the latter. There's also the propaganda value of such a media friendly attack, important after three years of war without any major offensive victories outside of North Africa. Far more people and capital have been sacrificed for far less reward.
    • But it was a huge project, involving hundreds of people and the expenditure of vast amounts of money.
      Once a project like that has started, no-one will ever cancel it, even if it is clear that it is not going to achieve anything, because no-one wants to be blamed for wasting all that money.

    • Re:Dam Buster Sucked! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by WillAdams ( 45638 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @09:13AM (#19875319) Homepage
      However, some 20,000 workers were diverted for months from building the Atlantic sea wall defences to repair the dams, which had far-reaching effects on D-Day.

      William

      • I've heard of Monday-morning quarter-backing, but you guys take the cake. Sixty to seventy years ago, and apparently WWII was won by just dumb luck, in spite of terrible, terrible mismanagement of the war.

        (Not meant necessarily for the parent poster, but a comment on the thread in general).

        • Agreed. [insert standard comment about those who don't learn from history]

          That's why I've been trying to share w/ my children all the stories I heard from my father about Vietnam and Korea, and from my uncles about World War II and from my great aunt who would relate stories of the Civil War she'd heard from her father (my great-grandfather), and of the Revolutionary War that her father had heard from Gen. Robert E. Lee (great-grandfather was one of his bodyguards) who had heard them from his father who was

    • You've just cherry-picked the worst paragraphs... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16, 2007 @09:50AM (#19875637)
      Tactically, the dam raid did not cause the catastrophic industrial disruption which had been hoped for, and the lack of a follow-up raid to suppress repairs meant that the Germans could recover. But strategically, Wikki has this to say:

      " The strategic view
      The Dams Raid was, like many British air raids, undertaken with a view to the need to keep drawing German defensive effort back into Germany and away from actual and potential theatres of ground war, a policy which culminated in the Berlin raids of the winter of 1943-44. In May 1943 this meant keeping the Luftwaffe and anti-aircraft defence forces' effort away from the Soviet Union; in early 1944, it meant clearing the way for the aerial side of the forthcoming Operation Overlord.

      By far the greatest and most unexpected effect was on German food production. The Ruhr valley below the dams was a major source of vital food for Germany, and large areas of arable land were rendered unusable and huge numbers of farm animals were killed. This had an immediate negative effect on German morale. In addition, the pictures of the broken dams proved to be a morale boost to the Allies, especially to the British, still suffering under German bombing."

      And of course, a major effect was to pursuade Harris to support Barnes Wallis's greatest contribution, the Tallboy and Grand Slam supersonic precision earth penetrators. These stopped the V2 and the V3, and sunk the Tirpitz, and well as the U-Boat pens at St Nazaire. The Americans wished they had something like them, and are only now developing something similar for use against Iran.

      • The Dams Raid was, like many British air raids, undertaken with a view to the need to keep drawing German defensive effort back into Germany and away from actual and potential theatres of ground war, a policy which culminated in the Berlin raids of the winter of 1943-44. In May 1943 this meant keeping the Luftwaffe and anti-aircraft defence forces' effort away from the Soviet Union; in early 1944, it meant clearing the way for the aerial side of the forthcoming Operation Overlord.
        For you new generation folks:

        The Dams Raid was, like many British air raids, basically base camping to keep the uber-GER clan from capping flags and holding the helo spawn point. Though the RUS clan was previously unimpressed, it let them get four levels higher on the PWNAGE ladder. Three BRIT-"lol-nub" team tipped the scales and made some righteous Fraps vids for Youtube.
      • Most of the article, and specifically the sections you quote, are unsupported by any references.

        Unsurprising as they run counter to common historical opinion - which is that the raids accomplished little of lasting importance. In particular the conclusion about the effect of the Dambuster's raid on AA is nonsense because a) the dams and other important industrial targets were already protected by AA, and b) the raids on German cities were already drawing AA away from the Eastern Front. (As well as

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dave420 ( 699308 )
      You should read the article more, as it states that it destroyed a massive part of the food production in the area, dealt a blow to German morale (while boosting that of the Brits), and gave Churchill more chips at the table when dealing with the other allied leaders. So directly and militarily, fair enough, but to say it served no purpose what-so-ever is short-sighted, especially when it's spelled out in the same article you quote from :)

    • Right, using a nazi to judge the impact (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      A, the raid was the first major blow the allies, especially england, managed to land againt the seeminly invincible germans. The raid proved that the germans could be hit, and deep inside their own country too. Morale matters, ask the americans about it sometime.(Vietnam, current conflict)

      B, it forced german forces to be relocated inland to defend other possible targets from air attack. Every piece of equipment and soldier NOT at the front meant german fighting power was reduced.

      C, the damage had to be repa

    • In addition to everything everyone else above has said I think that previous to this the RAF bombers operated at a level far below what you might describe as precision bombing and the training and lessons learnt by the 'Dambusters' squadron was propogated through bomber command and helped lead to more accurate precision raids later on.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by spun ( 1352 )
        The methods used to gain precision were limited to the particular operation. Two searchlights were mounted on the underbody of the aircraft in such a way that the beams converged at the right altitude. A scope was developed to take advantage of the fact that there were two towers at either side of the dam. When the towers matched up with the arms of the scope, it was time to drop the bomb.
    • Perfect example of intarweb pointless Monday-morning quarterbacking. This *may* be simply an effort to provide a postlog to the event, but it smells much more like whinging to me.

      Thank you for re-establishing my faith, shaken by a number of cogent, topical, and insightful posts this morning.

      Contrary to Jerry Bruckheimer movies and the legions of strawmen erected by critics since time immemorial, wars are neither precise, predictable, or particularly neat things.

      They involve a great deal of guesswork, opti

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by spun ( 1352 )
        The missions did achieve several objectives, including setting back water and electrical production. Follow up raids to halt rebuilding were canceled, so the Germans recovered more quickly than planned. The mission did impress the Russians that Britain could be a useful ally, and it had the unintended effect of disrupting food production far more than anticipated.

        Perhaps the most important effect, IMHO, was in restoring British moral badly damaged by continual German bombing. Read some of the comments by Br
    • destruction of one of the dams served no purpose at all,
      and the failure to follow up with additional raids represented a major lost opportunity for the Allies.

      1) Speer denied the Holocaust through his trial, sentence and this same book, so we can safely conclude he is a proven liar.
      2) The two claims are at odds, if it served no purpose, the why was it a major lost opportunity ?
  • A 275 pp pulp I got at a precocious age still devoted a significant percentage to analog. But, then, 5 years later Pickering was still offering high school classes bulk rates on slide rules.
  • Readers interested in this item may find the recent episode of Mystery "Foyle's War: Casulties of War" adds to their understanding:
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/mystery/foyleswar/series4. html#casualties [pbs.org]

    Great period series and this episode has specific ties to the topic at hand.

  • What's not mentioned (Score:5, Funny)

    by faloi ( 738831 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @09:12AM (#19875309)
    The rabbit population metrics were actually being used to determine how many rabbits it would take to destroy a dam. The dams the computer was used to build were just intended to be targets.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thewiz ( 24994 ) *
      Actually, they got the idea of the bouncing bombs from watching the rabbits in the study explode from Holy Hand Grenades.
  • Did anyone think this was going to be about a Meccano toy set? I was thinking to myself "A meccano toy set that's a computer!? Wow that's a helluva kid's construction toy!".
  • If they would only employ the Utopian method of raising rabbits they would have no need for such a computer...

  • Differential Analyser in "When Worlds Collide" (Score:4, Informative)

    by ishmalius ( 153450 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @10:19AM (#19875949)
    If you want to see a short clip (in color) of one of those devices in action, watch the George Pal version of "When Worlds Collide." (1951) In the script, one is used to verify the trajectory of the approaching planet.

  • Calculating machine, but no computer (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @11:02AM (#19876407) Journal
    This kind of devices were used to calculate differential equations using hydro-mechanical analogues of differentiators and integrators. Basically, this sort of calculating machine would be easiest implemented today, using operational amplifiers and discrete components such as resistors and capacitors (or even inductances).

    To be honest, in 1935 there were electronic tubes, and such a machine could have been implemented with them, therefore electronically. But probably the complexity and low reliability of electronic tubes of the time had rendered it unviable.
    • Actually, I think the equivalent would be to evaluate a given problem via a system of polynomial series, rather than a discrete computer model.
  • "However, the only original, complete Differential Analyser left in the world happens to be the one that helped Barnes Wallis design his famous bouncing bombs."

    In that case, what is the one that is in the Science Museum, London?
  • These old "analog" computers are really cool. The Communications of the ACM [acm.org] 60th anniversary retrospective issue from a few months ago talked about how the computing machinery field was once divided between people who wanted to build machines to do continuous computation and those who favored the discrete route. As computational machinery moved toward the discrete route, there were even "hybrid" machines where the digital side controlled an analog side. Of course, as TFA points out, these differential an

    • My analog computer experience (Score:4, Interesting)

      by KenSeymour ( 81018 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @10:24PM (#19883511)
      In the early '80s, I bought a used, rack-mounted electronic device. I also got some
      analog multipliers along with them.

      I took it to work where they had oscilloscopes I could use. One of the owners
      of the company recognized what it was and told me it was an analog computer.

      It had op-amp boards in it with a power backplane (you need +15 and -15 volts plus ground
      for example). On the end of each board was a row of holes connected to various inputs
      and outputs on the board.

      There were other boards with nails coming out of them, that you could solder together
      to make a "program". So you could switch from one program to another by pulling
      out all the boards with nails and wires, re-arranging the op-amp boards, and putting in a different
      set of boards with nails and wires.

      I was in college at the time and they guy who explained how it all worked was
      Ro Favreau. He had worked with analog computers for solving artillery
      trajectory problems.

      I remember fondly talking to him about it all and learning. I hope I will be able to pass on something I've learned over the years to some young man or woman engineer.

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