MACHINE LEARNING

Your feature in the autumn issue about Ada Lovelace reminded me that many years ago, a brilliant local physics student Gary Tee won a scholarship to either Cambridge or Oxford

University where he studied for a

PHD and came across a badly deteriorating Babbage machine. He was able to secure ownership and brought it back to New Zealand with him.

I was supervising the Physics Prototype Workshop at that time and was asked to overhaul it – a huge task which I turned down. That machine was moved to the Museum of Technology in Western Springs, Auckland, where a group of clever retired technicians rebuilt it to working order.

It was sold on from our museum in 1995 to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney which collects all types of computers.

That machine solved calculus problems. During World War I, range finding machines were built and used to detect incoming German bombers and they used a primitive type of the Babbage concept. In World War II, this was done digitally and the GPS plot passed directly to the plotting room which was underground in London where the WAAF plotted these incoming planes. A famous New Zealander, Sir Keith Park, ran the plotting bunker, and he called up our fighter planes to intercept German bombers. Our fighters were Spitfires, Hurricanes and

Mosquitoes. He succeeded in finally stopping those German raids over London which caused huge civilian housing fires and thousands of deaths and casualties.

One of my work mates was one of these plotters and he later emigrated to New Zealand to get away as far as possible from Europe and Great Britain. I worry that there are fewer and fewer people to remember these feats.

Eric Strickett, Henderson,

Auckland, New Zealand