Toy story
Question: While toying with a Meccano model, I wondered if any significant
inventions or principles owe their discovery to the use of Meccano, Lego or
similar construction toys.
Answer: My grandfather Douglas Hartree used Meccano to build several large
calculus machines for numerical analysis in the 1940s and 1950s. There is an
exhibit in the permanent collection at the Science Museum, London, which
features part of one of the inventions. He wrote several books on the subject,
some of which contain photographs of the machines.
Justin Hartree
Bristol
Answer: Vannevar Bush’s differential analyser, which he built at…
