There certainly were references to mechanical brains before the electronic ones, and there were also references to electric brains. Here is a 1948 quote, which I circulate to the list because it shows what someone like Edmund Berkeley could read while he was preparing his 1949 book: "During the war when paint was hard to get everywhere, steel power lines in tropic India rusted and fell. A power company in that far-off land had to find a way to send the same amount of electricity over the remaining transmission lines. Logically they brought the problem to Americas largest electromechanical brain at Georgia Tech. The brain has thought out similar problems from Florida to Pennsylvania"(0. Fanning, Tech Electric Brain Fixcs India Power, Atlanta J., p.2-B, July 25, 1948: the same article also described to this network analyzer as a 'giant brain'). For colleagues who may have a further interest in the issue: The quote is included in a 1996 article that I wrote for the Annals of the History of Computing (Annals, Volume 18, Number 4). In this I argued that there is deep continuity in the ideology of calling computing artifacts 'brains' (and intelligent machines, more generally), and that it is this continuity that explains why there was not much objection to the post-World War II presentation of the electronic computer as a thinking machine: the society was habituated to such presentations for many decades before the 1940s. At the time I had little idea of how deep this continuity actually was. Every genre of pre-electronic computing artifacts that I had the opportunity to study since then (used in the context of computing electrification or more generally) was uniformly thought as capable of artificial intelligence. The network analyzer of the interwar period looked physically like the ENIAC. But even something as humble as a slide rule (not to say a desktop calculator or a planimeter) was habitually called "brainy". -- Αριστοτέλης Τύμπας / Aristotle Tympas Assistant Professor, History of Technology in Modernity University of Athens, Greece Webpage: http://www.phs.uoa.gr/hst/Tympas.html