Tides Revisited

I plucked another Hugo off my shelf and found the following passage and I quote

 "He stood up from his desk and walked over to the sleekly streamlined, room-long tide-predicting machine. Inside the machine a wire ran through many movable precision pulleys, each pulley representing a factor influencing the tide at the Earth's hydrosphere, for which the machine was set; at the end of the wire a pen drew on a graph papered drum, a curve giving exact tides at that point hour by hour.

This is a reasonable description and Fritz Leiber must have seen a tide machine some where to be able to put this into his book. However in the next passage he starts giving credit to a German. Well I never!  Let's emphasize again the English invention of this machine particularly with Edward Roberts involvement.  There was a German machine listed in 1916 but the Roberts one was built in 1908 and had the largest number of factored component wheels at 40 where as the German one only had half that number at 20.  So There.

After traipsing the back blocks of Liverpool we uncovered the Tide Predictor 2013

Photo taken previously in 1999

I suspect that the machine was put back onto a different shelf after the Coast TV show visited Liverpool. Nicolas Crane has a lot more clout than us and had them get it off the shelf and put back together for a demonstration on that episode. In our case they unwrapped it so we could see it.