Page:Popular Mechanics 1928 01.pdf/17

 



Answers to mathematical problems, too complex for the human brain to master, are ground out with ease on an electrical instrument devised by eastern engineers. Given the conditions of the problem, it writes out the answer as efficiently as another machine takes in lumber and chemicals and produces finished boxes of matches, the authorities report. It is called the "Product Integraph." Dr. Vannevar Bush, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of its makers, says that it might be classed "as an adding machine carried to an extreme design. Where workers in the business world are ordinarily satisfied with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division of numbers, the engineer deals with curves and graphs which represent for him the past, present and future of the things in which he deals." The machine works especially in this field of graphs and curves. It is virtually a man-made brain which transcends human reasoning and readily plots the answer to some classes of problems that cannot now be solved by formal mathematics.

 



Choosing glass as a medium of expression, an eastern artist has produced a wide variety of creations rivaling those of the foreign glass blowers and showing new possibilities in the material as a decorative substance. Tiny fir trees with the delicate needles reproduced in glass are among the objects which he has made.