Less glamorously, Feynman spent his summer at the Frankford Arsenal working on a primitive sort of analog computer, a combination of gears and cams designed to aim artillery pieces. It all seemed mechanical and archaic—later he thought Bell Laboratories would have been a better choice after all. Still, even in his college workshops, he had never confronted such an urgent blending of mathematics and metal. To aim a gun turret meant converting sines and tangents into steel gears. Suddenly trigonometry had engineering consequences: long before the tangent of a near-vertical turret diverged to
...more
