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Binary marble adding machine

Beatiful, thanks for sharing!

Thomas, that is a really neat machine, thanks for sharing this with us. I am tempted to ask my wife's father, who is an expert woodworker, to make one of these for me.

It looks too bulky to carry around, so I'll keep my 50G.

You can find all the details on how to make that one yourself in MAKE magazine (makezine.com) Vol 20. Fun magazine in general - I recommend it!

(09-04-2014 03:30 PM)Jim Horn Wrote: [ -> ]You can find all the details on how to make that one yourself in MAKE magazine (makezine.com) Vol 20. Fun magazine in general - I recommend it!

+1 for MAKE magazine

So that's what was inside all those 74LS flip-flops and half adders.

I wonder if they could now make such a nano mechanism to count electrons in a similar manner. Sounds like a job for the IBM researchers to play with.

This marble adding machine was designed and built by Matthias Wandel some years ago. Already in the 1960s, John Thomas Godfrey invented two ingenious toys with ball flip-flops. Just search for Digicomp II and Dr Nim. The first person who had the idea to use rolling balls for a binary computer was no other than the inventor of the binary system himself, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, see http://history-computer.com/Dreamers/Leibniz.html.