MONIAC – Monetary National Income Analogue Computer

In action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAZavOcEnLg

If you think the MONIAC is interesting, it’s creator was also an interesting character.

Bill Phillips - is easily the most badass economist/mathematician to have lived in the 20th century.

He worked as a crocodile hunter and cinema manager in ANZAC and later moved to China during the Sino-Japanese War, but had to escape via the Soviet Union during the height of the Stalinist purges. Yet immediately after that he ended up joining the RAF and being posted in Singapore, which was then invaded by the Japanese, and he ended up being sent to a POW camp after being caught after trying to escape via Indonesia. During his time in the POW camp, he learnt Chinese, jerryrigged a secret water boiler for tea, and built a secret radio. Following WW2 he was then made an OBE due to his exploits in SEA.

As if that wasn’t enough, he went back to school to study maths and Econ at LSE and ended up developing the epynomeous Phillips Curve that is the backbone of macroeconomics (and his coauthor won a Nobel for it since Phillip died before the recognition).

Allan McRobie at the The University of Cambridge has a restored, working one of these, and gets it out and demos it sometimes. It's fascinating, and well worth watching all the way through:

https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1094078

Unlike the shorter 3 minute demos on YouTube, this is a full lecture into the history, construction and mathematics behind the machine!

I assume it’s not a coincidence that this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18846599 arrived on HN a couple of hours apart.

When I was a teenager in the mid 1990s I saw this at the Science Museum in London and modelled it in Mathematica.

If anyone is in London, one of these is also on display in the "Mathematics" Gallery at the Science Museum - along with some other very interesting devices.