Page:Edinburgh Review Volume 59.djvu/317

1834. Unlike all other machinery, the calculating mechanism produces, not the object of consumption, but the machinery by which that object may be made. To say that it computes and prints with infallible accuracy, is to understate its merits:—it computes and fabricates the means of printing with absolute correctness and in unlimited abundance.

For the sake of clearness, and to render ourselves more easily intelligible to the general reader, we have in the preceding explanation thrown the mechanism into an arrangement somewhat different from that which is really adopted. The dials expressing the numbers of the tables of the successive differences are not placed, as we have supposed them, in horizontal rows, and read from right to left, in the ordinary way; they are, on the contrary, placed vertically, one below the other, and read from top to bottom. The number of the table occupies the first vertical column on the right, the units being expressed on the lowest dial, and the tens on the next above that, and so on. The first difference occupies the next vertical column on the left; and the numbers of the succeeding differences occupy vertical columns, proceeding regularly to the left; the constant difference being on the last vertical column. It is intended in the machine now in progress to introduce six orders of differences, so that there will be seven columns of dials; it is also intended that the calculations shall extend to eighteen places of figures: thus each column will have eighteen dials. We have referred to the dials as if they were inscribed upon the faces of wheels, whose axes are horizontal and planes vertical. In the actual machinery the axes are vertical and the planes horizontal, so that the edges of the figure wheels, as they are called, are presented to the eye. The figures are inscribed, not upon the dial-plate, but around the surface of a small cylinder or barrel, placed upon the axis of the figure wheel, which revolves with it; so that as the figure wheel revolves, the figures on the barrel are successively brought to the front, and pass under an index engraved upon a plate of metal immediately above the barrel. This arrangement has the obvious practical advantage, that, instead of each figure wheel having a separate axis, all the figure wheels of the same vertical column revolve on the same axis; and the same observation will apply to all the wheels with which the figure wheels are in mechanical connexion. This arrangement has the further mechanical advantage over that which has been assumed for the purposes of explanation, that the friction of the wheel-work on the axes is less in amount, and more uniformly distributed, than it could be if the axes were placed in the horizontal position.

A notion may therefore be formed of the front elevation of the