tions simultaneous which were before necessarily successive. The notation was now again called into requisition, and a new disposition of the parts was made. At this point of the investigation, this extraordinary instrument of mechanical analysis put forth one of its most singular exertions of power. It presented to the eye of the engineer two currents of mechanical action, which, from their nature, could not be simultaneous; and each of which occupied a complete revolution of the axis, except about a twentieth; the one occupying the last nineteen-twentieths of a complete revolution of the axis, and the other occupying the first nineteen-twentieths of a complete revolution. One of these streams of action was, the successive picking up by the carrying fingers of the successive carrying claws; and the other was, the successive shooting of nineteen bolts by the nineteen bolting fingers. The notation rendered it obvious, that as the bolting action commenced a small space below the commencement of the carrying, and ended an equal space below the termination of the carrying, the two streams of action could be made to flow after one another in one and the same revolution of the axis. He thus succeeded in reducing the period of completing the action to four turns of the axis; when the notation again informed him that he had again attained a limit of condensed action, which could not be exceeded without a further change in the mechanism. To the mechanism he again recurred, and soon found that it was possible to introduce a change which would cause the action to be completed in three revolutions of the axis. An odd number of revolutions, however, being attended with certain practical inconveniences, it was considered more advantageous to execute the motions in four turns; and here again the notation put forth its powers, by informing the inventor, through the eye, almost independent of his mind, what would be the most elegant, symmetrical, and harmonious disposition of the required motions in four turns. This application of an almost metaphysical system of abstract signs, by which the motion of the hand performs the office of the mind, and of profound practical skill in mechanics alternately, to the construction of a most complicated engine, forcibly reminds us of a parallel m another science, where the chemist with difficulty succeeds in dissolving a refractory mineral, by the alternate action of the most powerful acids, and the most caustic alkalies, repeated in long-continued succession.
This important discovery was explained by Mr Babbage, in a short paper read before the Royal Society, and published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1826.[1] It is to us more a
- ↑ Phil. Trans. 1820, Part III. p, 250, on a method of expressing by signs the action of machinery.
