Tide calculator

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Thomson's tide calculator from 1876
First German tide calculator from 1915 in the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven
Tide calculator of the GDR in the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven
Tide calculator in the Deutsches Museum in Munich

Tide tables had appeared in Great Britain as early as 1833 . In 1872/76, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) built a tide calculator that calculated the water levels of the Thames , taking into account the moon, sun, earth's rotation and a few other parameters. Mechanical gears served as integrators that were coupled to one another via rope pulley gears. In 1878 it was exhibited at the Paris World Exhibition.

In the USA, William Ferrel devised the first tide calculator in the early 1880s.

Due to the First World War, the data of the English hydrography in Germany were no longer available. Therefore, the first German tide calculator was built in 1915/16 by the mathematician Friedrich Kühnen at the Geodetic Institute Potsdam together with the designer Reipert from the Otto Toepfer & Sohn company in Potsdam on the secret order of the Reichsmarinamt. It was equipped with twenty arithmetic units and could calculate the tides of a harbor for a year in twenty hours. The result was output as a curve. The second German and at the same time largest tide calculator in the world was built according to plans by Heinrich Rauschenbach by the Mechanoptik-Gesellschaft für Präzisionstechnik, Erich Aude & Ernst Reipert . The 7.5 m long machine is now in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

In the GDR, a scaled-down copy of the second German tide calculator was made by Walter Below, under the mathematician in charge Wilhelm Oehmisch, from 1952–1955 at VEB equipment and control works (Berlin-) Teltow, Plant III, Precision Mechanics, together with VEB Lokomotivbau "Karl Marx" constructed with 34 tides now. It weighs eight tons, is more than five meters long, a good two meters high and one meter wide. Until the end of the 1960s, she did her job with the Sea Hydrographic Service of the GDR in Rostock. After reunification, it was brought to the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven and rebuilt by 1999.

literature

  • Heinrich Rauschelbach: The German tide calculator ; In: Zeitschrift für Instrumentenkunde ; Volume 44 (1924), pp. 285-303
  • Oldest tide calculator ; In: Hansa: international maritime journal ; Volume 112 (1975)
  • Tide calculator ; In Piekfall: newsletter for the friends of the gaff rig ; 1999, pp. 13-14
  • Günther Sager: Tide forecasts and tide calculators , Warnemünde 1955

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jörg Zaun: Instruments for Science. Innovations in Berlin precision mechanics and optics 1871-1914 , Verlag für Wissenschafts- und Regionalgeschichte, Berlin, 2002, p. 158, ISBN 3-929134-39-X .
  2. ^ Günther Sager: Tide predictions and tide calculators . Sea Hydrographic Service of the German Democratic Republic, Warnemünde 1955, p. 69-71 .
  3. ↑ Ute Kehse: Precision work with small errors ; at berliner-zeitung.de
  4. ↑ How the GDR wanted to predict ebb and flow with a monster machine . ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed on August 10, 2017]).
  5. ↑ http://gso.gbv.de/DB=2.1/PPNSET?PPN=501923861
  6. ↑ http://gso.gbv.de/DB=2.1/PPNSET?PPN=640685463
  7. ↑ http://gso.gbv.de/DB=2.1/SET=1/TTL=1/SHW?FRST=1/PRS=HOL