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The first tide predicting machine (TPM) was built in 1872 by the Légé Engineering Company. [11] A model of it was exhibited at the British Association meeting in 1873 [12] (for computing 8 tidal components), followed in 1875-76 by a machine on a slightly larger scale (for computing 10 tidal components), was designed by Sir William Thomson (who later became Lord Kelvin). [13]
Tide-Predicting Machine No. 2 was the first tide-predicting machine to incorporate both a paper graph of the tides–the approach used by earlier British machines–and dials and scales that showed the tide height and corresponding date and time–used by Tide-Predicting Machine No. 1.
He briefly worked under Karl Pearson first in statistics, then in ballistics calculating shell trajectories until the end of WWI. Joining the newly founded Tidal Institute in Liverpool in 1919 he produced tide tables, and was involved in designing tide-predicting machines. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The calculations of tide predictions using the harmonic constituents are laborious, and from the 1870s to about the 1960s they were carried out using a mechanical tide-predicting machine, a special-purpose form of analog computer. More recently digital computers, using the method of matrix inversion, are used to determine the tidal harmonic ...
The first modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine, invented by Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, in 1872. It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide levels for a set period at a particular location and was of great utility to navigation in shallow waters.
Thomson's tide-predicting machine. Thomson was an enthusiastic yachtsman, his interest in all things relating to the sea perhaps arising from, or fostered by, his experiences on the Agamemnon and the Great Eastern. Thomson introduced a new method of deep-sea depth sounding, in which a steel piano wire replaces the ordinary hand line. The wire ...
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One of the earliest practical uses of Thomson's concepts was a tide-predicting machine built by Kelvin starting in 1872–3. On Lord Kelvin's advice, Thomson's integrating machine was later incorporated into a fire-control system for naval gunnery being developed by Arthur Pollen , resulting in an electrically driven, mechanical analogue ...