JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Olaus Henrici (1840-1918) constructed a beautiful and tidy analog computer to analyze musical sound, publishing his efforts in The Philosophical Magazine in 1894. It was a mechanical fourier analyzer, in the heritage of the harmonic analyzer/tide predicting computer of James Thomson and his brother Lord Kelvin, analyzing a traced sound waveform. It was built upon in turn by Dayton Miller and much expanded.
William Fickinger has this solid description in his book, [Dayton] Miller’s Waves: An Informal Scientific Biography, (2011) found on page 69:
A little more background on the harmonic analyzer and Henrici as follows:
- Robert K. Otnes in The Oughtred Society, “Notes on Mechanical Fourier Analyzers” http://www.oughtred.org/jos/articles/V17.1_OtnesPaper.pdf
- Full text of the Henrici paper from the Biodiversity Heritage Library http://biodiversitylibrary.org/item/122066#page/124/mode/1up
- On Olaus Henrici https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaus_Henrici
- http://www.phys.cwru.edu/ccpi/Harmonic_analyzer.html