[SIGCIS-Members] Obscure Edwardian science and engineering magazines, and Percy Ludgate

[Brian Randell]

 Hi:

For the past several years I have been involved in an extensive project led by Dr Brian Coghlan of Trinity College Dublin that is researching the life and work of Percy Ludgate. The paper that Ludgate published in the Scientific Record of the Royal Dublin Society in 1909 is notable for its description of his design for what we would now term a mechanical programmable digital computer, the first after Babbage’s “Analytical Engine” of over sixty years earlier. In this paper Ludgate said he had made “many drawings of the machine and its parts”, but neither this paper nor the one subsequent article he is known to have published (about Babbage’s machine, in the 1914 Napier Tercentenary Celebration Handbook) contained  any illustrations.

We have recently determined that Ludgate’s 1909 paper attracted notice at the time (beyond its review by C.V Boys in the journal “Nature”), in that it led promptly to articles in two popular engineering magazines. These were “Engineering” (a London-based monthly magazine founded in 1865 that is still going strongly) and “The English Mechanic and World of Science” (which appeared weekly from 1865 to 1926). Both of these articles included a drawing - presumably by Ludgate - of his “Irish logarithm” multiplication mechanism!

Neither of these articles was at all easily found. I’d be grateful for any suggestions as to other obscure magazines and journals, or other sources, not necessarily from the UK, whose contents have so far escaped Google’s attention, which might include contemporaneous commentary on Ludgate’s paper and machine or his involvement with the Napier Tercentenary Celebration - and also for help in searching their contents.

Brian Randell

—

School of Computing, Newcastle University, 1 Science Square,
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5TG
EMAIL = Brian.Randell at ncl.ac.uk<mailto:Brian.Randell at ncl.ac.uk>   PHONE = +44 191 208 7923
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