I love mechanical calculating devices. When I attended high school as we were closing on the end of the last millennium, the state of the art in student calculating devices were slide rules and tables of trigonometric functions.

When I was eventually introduced to calculus, it made my head hurt. I only wish I’d had access to Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz. Unfortunately, this bodacious beauty was published half a century too late to help me.

On the bright side, reading this book has made a lot of things clear. The author does what I like best, which is explaining how things came to be (like the origins of calculus in ancient Greece) and looking at things from a different perspective to traditionally boring books.

Some time ago, I wrote a blog about The Analog Thing (THAT), as part of which I shared a video about analog computational devices making a comeback.

And part of that video showed a mechanical mechanism that can perform integration (it brought a little tear of joy to my eye).

The reason for my waffling here is that, recently, my friend Jay Dowling shared a link to another video. This one featured a mechanical device called the Ott Derivimeter from the 1930s that can determine the derivative of a curve drawn on paper.

The creator of this video is Chris Staecker, who is a professor of mathematics at Fairfield University. Chris’s field of research is topological fixed-point theory and digital topology. In his spare time (ha!), Chris has created a bunch of videos about antique computing devices… you'll have to excuse me... I may be gone for some time…