MECHANICAL CALCULATION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23859, 13 July 1939, Page 20

MECHANICAL CALCULATION

POSSIBLE ACHIEVEMENTS ADDRESS BY DR L. J. COMRIE (From Our Own Correspondent) LONDON. June 8, An address described as “outside the ordinary run ” was given by Dr L. J. Comrie, formerly of Auckland, to the Batti Wallahs’ Society recently. Dr L. J. Comrie is a professor of mathematics and a professor of astronomy, and for ten years he was responsible for the “ Nautical Almanac, which is a guide to the sailor by giving him the positions of the sun and moon and slars and planets for every day of the year. At the luncheon he did not dwell on this topic to any extent beyond explaining how on his first sea voyage from New Zealand to Britain during the war he was able, by noting the position of the sun and by the actions of the ship’s officers, to calculate the position of the vessel. Since he ceased his connection with the “Nautical Almanac,” Dr Comrie has been engaged in a private capacity, and his talk described some of the possible achievements in calculation by mechanical aids. One of his jobs, for instance, nad been to calculate the position of the moon up to the year 2000. a task of great complexity, but by means of punch card machines the work was accomplished in about seven months.

One thing ho said he had never done and never intended to do was to design a machine, because there were in existence machines which did what was required. One of these machines, for instance, in one year printed 30,000,000 figures, which meant turning out five or six per second. By means of blackboard illustrations the speaker explained how he set about obtaining a given calculation, and he demonstrated how the machines operated.