Profile Tracer [Transcription of Video]

Kahn: In 1912, Vannevar Bush was a graduate student at Tufts University in Medford, MA. His first invention, called the profile tracer, was for surveying land. This machine would actually draw out the profile of the land that you ran it across. It could do this because of a mechanism called a wheel integrator that would plot on paper. It was this basic technology that became the starting point for many of the analog machines that Bush later developed at MIT with his graduate students.

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