“The better your binary addition skills the better your cup of tea!” The Universal Tea Machine by Smout Allen is a huge mechanical ‘adding computer’ that mixes tea and mixes tea, a British tradition that became popular in the 1600s through trade across Asia, with English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing‘s Universal Turing Machine. It was built for the London 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic celebrations. From wikipedia:
A mechanical computer is built from mechanical components such as levers and gears, rather than electronic components. The most common examples are adding machines and mechanical counters, which use the turning of gears to increment output displays. More complex examples could carry out multiplication and division…
Related reading: Mechanical calculator, binary number, and Teasmade.
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