Tide-predicting machine

Already in 1833 were published tide tables in the UK. 1872/76 built William Thomson ( later Lord Kelvin), a tide calculator, the calculated water levels of the River Thames, while Moon, Sun, Earth's rotation and some other parameters into account. Mechanical transmission served as integrators who were coupled together by rope pulley transmission. In 1878 she was exhibited at the Paris World Exhibition.

In the U.S., William Ferrel invented in the early 1880s a first tidal calculating machine.

By the First World War the British Hydrographic data were no longer available. Therefore, the first German tide Abacus 1915/16 by the mathematician Friedrich Bold at the Geodetic Institute Potsdam was built together with the designer Reipert by the company Otto Toepfer & Son in Potsdam in the Secret Order of the Imperial Naval Office. It was equipped with twenty calculators and could the tide of a port for a year calculated in twenty hours. The result was displayed as a curve.

In the GDR was 1952-1955 when VEB devices and controller works ( Berlin ) Teltow, Plant III, precision engineering along with the VEB locomotive " Karl Marx " by Walter Below, under the charge mathematician Wilhelm Oehmisch, a reduced copy of the second German tide calculator constructed with now 34 tides. It weighs eight tons, is more than five meters long, two meters high and one meter wide. Until the late 1960s, she performed duties in the service of the GDR Seehydrographischen in Rostock. She was brought to the turn of the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven and up to 1999 again.