Thomson made a machine that could do the math Laplace envisioned. We know today that the tides depend on hundreds of different motions, but many of them have relatively insignificant contributions ...

there were other schools of thought that introduced a different kind of computer – one that ran on water. In the 1930s, the Russian scientist Vladimir Lukyanov built an analog computer known as ...

The math behind the tidal movement is so complex that some of the earliest analog computers were built specifically to perform tide calculations. Sir William Thomson (better known as Lord Kelvin ...