at the Museo Leonardo Torres Quevedo in Madrid. Austrian computer pioneer Heinz Zemanek saw the chess automaton demonstrated at the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958. These devices, which did not play a complete chess game, were restricted to the end game—king and rook against king.

factured in Germany, France, and

Switzerland and widely disseminated. Credit is generally attributed to Heinrich Kummer of Germany (1847).

The “planimeter” was invented at the beginning of the 19th century by Johann Martin Herrmann of Germany (1814), Tito Gonnella of Italy (1824), and Johannes Oppikofer of Switzerland (1827). Much more successful were the precise polar planimeters (see Figure 7). The three most influential early designers and manufacturers of these and other integrating instruments were Jakob and Alfred Amsler of Schaffhausen, Switzerland, Gottlieb Coradi of Zürich, and Albert Ott of Kempten, Germany.

The Swiss cylinder musical box (see
Figure 8) uses a sophisticated pro-
gram store (pinned cylinder). Its suc-
cessor was the German disk musical
box with a perforated disk (invented
in 1885) that involved much simpler
production. The many mechanical
musical instruments in Europe at the
time were replaced by the phonograph
(Emile Berliner of Germany and the
U.S.) and the gramophone (Thomas
Alva Edison and his Swiss-born engi-
neer Johann Heinrich Krüsi). Another
form of storage was music rolls (perfo-
rated paper rolls).

20th Century

Cylindrical slide rule. The world’s largest and most precise mass-produced cylindrical slide rule (see Figure 9) was manufactured by Loga Calculator AG in Zürich and Uster, Switzerland. The drum contains 80 sections, each 60 centimeters long; the length of the scale (due to overlapping) is 24 meters. Prior to mid-2013, only three surviving copies were known. Since then, four more have been discovered in Switzerland. Fuller’s spiral slide rule has a scale of 12. 7 meters; for details see Bruderer and Meilensteine. 6

Chess automatons. Playing chess is often regarded as requiring intelligence. Two operational chess automata were created in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century by Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres (y) Quevedo, who also built a cable car for spanning a portion of Niagara Falls.

In 1912, he designed his first electromechanical chess machine (see Figure 10), followed by a second device several years later (see Figure 11). Both machines are today on display

Figure 9. The world’s largest mass-produced cylindrical slide rule from Loga Calculator (circa 1912), Zürich/Uster, Switzerland; length of scale: 24 meters. Multiplication is reduced to addition and division to subtraction in the same way traditional slide rules work. These devices were common in banks and insurance companies worldwide. Courtesy of UBS, Basel, Switzerland.

Figure 10. Early electromechanical chess automaton (1912) by Torres Quevedo; unlike Wolfgang von Kempelen’s machine, it is an authentic automaton without hidden human chess player. Courtesy of Museo Leonardo Torres Quevedo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain.

Figure 11. Second automatic chess endgame machine by Torres Quevedo, playing with king and rook (automaton) vs. king (human player). Courtesy of Museo Leonardo Torres Quevedo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain.