the.com/machines
the tireless army humanity built to do our dirty work, then quietly handed our jobs to
means Devices or systems, often powered and made of moving parts, built to perform tasks with little or no human effort.
from From Latin 'machina' — a device, contrivance, or even a clever trick — which came through French 'machine' into English. The Latin itself traces back to a Greek root, the Doric 'machana,' a cousin of 'mechanos' (resource, expedient) and the source of 'mechanism.' So buried in the word is the old idea not just of an engine but of ingenuity — a cunning means to an end.
- first machine
- The lever, described by Archimedes around 250 BCE
- word origin
- From Greek makhana, meaning a clever contrivance
- simple six
- All machines descend from six classical simple ones
- perpetual motion
- Forever impossible, yet patent offices still get applications
- turing's dream
- A theoretical machine that can compute anything computable
the analytical engine — charles babbage's 1837 mechanical computer design, considered the first general-purpose computer
the jacquard loom — joseph-marie jacquard's 1804 automated silk loom in lyon, france, controlled by punch cards
the difference engine — babbage's 1822 mechanical calculator that could compute polynomial functions
eniac — electronic numerical integrator and computer completed in 1946 at university of pennsylvania, first general-purpose electronic computer