Building Babbage's Analytical Engine 56
An anonymous reader writes "Anybody think 3-D printing technology will have enough moxie to pull off a construction of Babbage's analytical engine by 2021, the 150th anniversary of Babbage's passing? The Guardian reports, 'Plan 28 – named after one set of Babbage's plans – has assembled the leading technical experts on his designs and just started fundraising. The first stage of the project involves studying the thousands of pages of handwritten notes that Babbage left behind, to determine what exactly needs to be built. Once the study is complete, we'll be building a 3D physical computer simulation of the analytical engine to verify that his design is workable. Reaching that stage is likely to cost about £250,000. Only once the feasibility of building the machine has been established will the much larger fundraising effort needed for the actual construction to begin. But what we hope to do is create a working monument to the man who conceived the computer, and to inspire today's scientists and engineers to dream a century into their future.'"
Already underway (Score:5, Interesting)
Another rebuild that has progressed way further: http://www.meccano.us/analytical_engine/index.html I suspect this will end up a lot cheaper too....
i don't get this (Score:1, Interesting)
plenty of 3D model enthusiasts are making very complex files as a hobby on consumer grade computers, but these "pros" can't seem to be able to replicate a 19th century design without needing hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Re:i don't get this (Score:5, Interesting)
The 19th century design was never built and probably wouldn't have worked. Machines which have been built from Babbage's designs have a tendency to jam.
Mechanical friction (Score:4, Interesting)
To be more specific: with so many toothed wheels it's not just a problem in recreating logical process flow. What are the allowable tolerances for the thing not to jam? What are the necessary tolerances for the thing to move at all, lubricated or not? Is there even a window of tolerance where the thing can complete its moves without jamming?
-wb-
Re:It's not hard to do, just moderately expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no good reason for the 50-digit precision, and 1000 memory locations is too much for the compute power available (about 1 IPS). Like programmable calculators, 10 digits and 100 memory locations would have been enough for most problems.
No, you are mistaken. Such programmable calculators have 10 digits of *precision* plus an exponent. In other words, they store floating point numbers. The analytical engine was fixed-point, so far more digits were required for many calculations.
Floating point arithmetic wasn't invented theoretically until 1914. A working physical model didn't appear until 1938 or so.
3D printing isn't really appropriate as a way to make brass parts,
3D selective powder sintering can print 3D brass parts. Though you are correct, for sheets CNC jet cutting is better and for the quantity of gears required casting would be better.
Re:250k would have helped (Score:5, Interesting)
Sooo... yeah. Babbage was a tinkerer. And while that's all good, turns out that at some point you have to sit down, declare feature freeze and just build something. Otherwise your investors will get tired of hearing about how many improvements you've come up with. And so will your machinist. Something, something, perfect, enemy, good...