17 Oct
2010
17 Oct
'10
7:35 p.m.
On 17/10/2010 8:23 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
William Donzelli wrote:
I suspect it comes under *mass production * of parts all the same
quality. That did not come about until the late 19 th century.
Also I think I read that it was common to have errors in blue prints
of the time, so industrial theft would be harder to achieve.
With one big difference - it was basically
unbuildable by the British
machinists of the time.
That was the conventional wisdom, but has since been
disproven by the
Science Museum in London. They measured the tolerances that Joseph
Clement achieved in the working models of the arithmetic mechanisms of
the DE#1 that he built for Babbage, and deliberately built a DE#2 using
parts machined to comparable tolerances and got it to work. Unbuildable by *average* British machinists of the
time, quite likely,
but Babbage didn't try to have it built by an average machinist.
Ben.