Name/Title
1949/03, Popular Mechanics, "Brains That Click"Tags
Popular MechanicsDescription
For 300 years scientists have been working on mechanical devices to take the drudgery out of mathematics. But it’s only recently that they’ve come up with anything worth shouting about.
Today, in the mathematical and engineering laboratories of America’s universities and research centers, giant robots are being built that can do complicated problems thousands of times faster than the human brain, store up long strings of figures in their “memories,” flash red lights and ring bells when they get out of whack, and tackle problems so complex it staggers the imagination.
“Some of these machines are almost human,” a mathematician said recently. “It gives you the creeps to think what they can do.”
The high-speed calculators of science, however, don’t remotely resemble the popular notion of a mechanical robot. Instead, they are huge mechanical and electronic machines that cost up to $750,000, weigh as much as 100 tons, fill whole rooms and are equipped with thousands of vacuum tubes and millions of feet of wire. If you can imagine a Rube Goldberg combination radio - phonograph - telephone switchboard - organ console - typewriter newspaper teletype-pin-ball machine, you will have a faint notion of a high-speed calculator’s appearance.
