[FoRK] weighed curve computation

[Dave Long]

Despite having used planimeters, which seem related to the first  
device, and having been guilty of accounting by weight (as well as --  
after Ford -- by height), I would never, in this era of cheap  
transistors, have thought of applying a M-T to questions of area...

research!rsc, "Computing History at Bell Labs"
<http://research.swtch.com/2008/04/computing-history-at-bell-labs.html>
> When Bell Labs was founded, it had of course some calculating  
> machines, and it had one wonderful computer. This. That was bought  
> in 1918. There's almost no other computing equipment from any time  
> prior to ten years ago that still exists in Bell Labs. This is an  
> integraph. It has two styluses. You trace a curve on a piece of  
> paper with one stylus and the other stylus draws the indefinite  
> integral here. There was somebody in the math department who gave  
> this service to the whole company, with about 24 hours turnaround  
> time, calculating integrals. Our recent vice president Arno Penzias  
> actually did, he calculated integrals differently, with a different  
> background. He had a chemical balance, and he cut the curves out of  
> the paper and weighed them.


-Dave

(it appears M.V. Lomonosov used this massively parallel approach to  
numerical integration a few centuries before Penzias)