There is an argument to be made that whichever hue of political buffoons ends up in Number 10 Downing Street, the White House, the Élysée Palace, or wherever the President, Prime Minister or despot lives in your country, eventually they will send the economy down the drain.
Fortunately, there is a machine for that. MONIAC is an analogue computer with water as its medium, designed to simulate a national economy for students. Invented in 1949 by the New Zealand economist [WIlliam Phillips], it is a large wooden board with a series of tanks interconnected by pipes and valves. Different sections of the economy are represented by the water tanks, and the pipes and valves model the flow of money between them. Spending is downhill gravitational water flow, while taxation is represented by a pump which returns money to the treasury at the top. It was designed to represent the British economy in the late 1940s as [Philips] was a student at the London School of Economics when he created it. Using the machine allowed students and economists for the first time to simulate the effects of real economic decisions in government, in real time.
So if you have a MONIAC, you can learn all about spectacularly mismanaging the economy, and then in a real sense flush the economy down the drain afterwards. The video below shows Cambridge University’s restored MONIAC in operation, and should explain the device’s workings in detail.
We’ve featured more than one analogue computer here at Hackaday over the years, but this is the first water-powered one. There was a 1959 commercial offering for example, or tide prediction computers, Enrico Fermi’s beautiful-in-simplicity Monte Carlo simulation calculator, and an analogue computer tutorial from our colleague Bil Herd.
Thanks [Josh] for the reminder.
Header image: Marcin Wichary [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
The Soviets built a Water Integrator in 1936 that was being used to solve non-homogeneous differential equations. Apparently it was still being used until the 80’s
I have a bathtub too .. I should now call it, my “Water Integrator”,
It can also integrate three times to display my Volume, but the reading is difficult when you need to stay submerged to get the total body volume ..
;)
Lukyanov’s Water Integrator was built for the particular purpose of solving concrete cracking problems.
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/338106#ixzz46wtUPCbehttp://www.digitaljournal.com/article/338106
thanks for the read.
pardon me for being funny ;)
As a mechanical engineer I do really like the “ancient” ways of solving a problem elgantly and not go brute force on it (brute force = FEM, CFD, Coupled Solvers)
I can only recomend that every mechanical engineer should posses a 1930s edition of Stephen Timoshenko’s
“Vibration problems in engineering” (or in german “Schwingungsprobleme der Technik”).
Which is also about describing systems with differential equations and solve those,
You could fill it entirely, then submerge yourself causing water to overflow, then exit and read the scale, then mop up the mess you just did in your bathroom :D
Does this remind anyone else of the gizmo in the Diskworld story “Making Money”?
Sure does – it was my immediate thought.
I was just going to comment about the Glooper
http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Glooper
The Glooper is in fact based on these early machines.
I like to think that eventually Hex was linked to the Glooper, thus creating the Inter-tubes*.
*The tubes, of course, are how the ants and water traveled from one system to the other. One of the biggest engineering challenges was how to interface between the two, with the final solution being powered by thirsty ants.
That is no accident. Terry Pratchett was a clever, wonderful author who always tried to slip in something educational into everything he wrote. History, Math, Science and Art were all fair game.
It’s like finding the hidden Mickey Mouse in every Disney movie, but better! You always learn something, surreptitiously.
Came here to say this. RIP Terry.
I didn’t know there was a hidden Mickey Mouse in every Disney movie…
Star Wars: The Force Awakens….
Was Pulp Fiction a Disney one? I remember something absurd like that due to them or one of their subsidiaries acquiring a studio, may have been a different “very un-disney” movie though.
Except for the last Science of Discworld, which I doubt he really had much to do with. It’s mostly just bashing the USA.
well, seems as if Pratchett read Marx
(maybe Commander Vimes did too)
There is/was one in the Science museum, London. http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/online_science/explore_our_collections/objects/index/smxg-64127?agent=smxg-133687
Came here to say this – it’s a fascinating device.
I visited the Science Museum recently (to see the excellent Cosmonauts exhibition) and the Computing gallery has been rearranged. Didn’t see the Moniac on display in the new Information Age gallery.
In my opinion, this analog computer is a great teaching tool. Direct showing of changes is much better than just entering the numbers into a formula and getting the result.
Set one up on the stage of every political candidate here in the U.S.A. and have it demonstrate their proposed economic “reforms”.
Well said.
Would it work with a negative volume of water?
B^)
Gahh! I want to see the next bit where it does the calculating!
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has “the first production example and the only one known to be in working order
in the Southern Hemisphere” “on long-term loan from the NZIER (New Zealand Institute of Economic Research)” in its museum. (http://rbnz.govt.nz/search?q=moniac).