On Apr 25, 4:52 pm, phil chastney
<phil.hates.s...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
....
> my goodness, that stuff is gorgeous -- thanks ever so much for these
links
>
> to the best of my knowledge, the red and green Meccano is no longer
> available -- the company is now French-owned, I believe, and the colours
> tend to be more (what..?) fashionable? purple and silver, for instance
>
> IIRC, when the Science Museum built their first difference engine, they
> found that Babbage's problem was not only that the required accuracy was
> not available at that time, but the materials would not have been up to
> the job either ...
>
> /phil
Phil,
Tim Robinson would say that if a working difference engine can be
built from Meccano, tolerances must not have been real critical to the
design. One problem when the first difference engine was being built
in Babbage's time (ca. 1830) was his engineer/machinist Joseph
Clement* was a perfectionist who may have taken more time than needed
achieving higher tolerances than were needed in many parts of the
machinery. The Science Museum of London, when building Difference
Engine #2 used, as much as it could determine, materials that would
have been used in Babbage's time. It is true that getting everything
to work smoothly is a major hassle! Curtis
* Interchangeable parts were on the near horizon when Babbage and
Clement worked on the difference engine. One of Clement's employees
was ????? Whitworth whose name persists in screw thread nomenclature.
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