The Dudley Tables
1857 · Machine-Set Type · Work 498 of 1,871
A bound volume of astronomical tables of 1857 lying open, page after page of ruled columns of figures, the type impressions faintly irregular where they were stamped by a difference engine, the paper cream and heavy, the binding plain cloth with a plain spine, the fore-edge of the closed pages showing at one side, the pages held open flat, the volume laid flat on a grey studio table, even flat light from directly above, the book alone in the frame.
- What it was used for
- The 1853 machine was bought for the Dudley Observatory in Albany in 1856: $5,000, about £1,000, paid by John F. Rathbone of Albany and arranged by the astronomer Benjamin A. Gould; it arrived in 1857. While still in London it produced the volume "Specimens of Tables, Calculated, Stereomoulded, and Printed by Machinery" (1857). At Albany in 1858 it worked on a contract from the US Navy Department for the Nautical Almanac Office and computed tables for the planet Mars.
- What was new
- Which tables exactly are meant here is not clear in the sources checked: the 1857 volume was printed in London, and the Mars tables of 1858 at Albany were, according to History of Information, experimental and probably never printed on paper. What both had in common: the figures were not set but impressed. The Smithsonian calls the machine the first computing machine to carry out computations under US government contract. The barb: after Gould left the observatory in a dispute, the machine was, in Merzbach's words, used rarely in later years and gradually fell into total disuse.
Further reading
- Uta C. Merzbach: Georg Scheutz and the First Printing Calculator (Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology)
- Smithsonian Institution: Scheutz Difference Engine (NMAH 997042)
- History of Information: William Farr Publishes the First Instances of a Printing Calculator Used to Do Original Work
- Georg Scheutz: Specimens of Tables, Calculated, Stereomoulded, and Printed by Machinery (1857), Internet Archive