It reads: Engineers and physicists are depending increasingly upon mechanical devices as aids in computation. This tendency is bound to grow as analysis is extended to problems of greater inherent complexity. Business office practice has been revolutionized by the advent of computing machines. These deal almost entirely in terms of numbers, as indeed does the business man, and machines are available which will add, multiply, tabulate, and perform other useful operations on sets of figures introduced into the machines by pressing keys. Applied physics, and in fact many other branches of science, frequently deal, however, with functions as a whole, and usually resort to figures only as a rather laborious means of dealing with functions or the curves which represent them. Accordingly there is need for computing machines which will deal directly with the functions themselves; machines, in other words, into which may be introduced graphically the scientific relationships with which we deal, and which will perform useful operations upon them directly as curves.
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