Cute. Although rather complex for just basic gates. It's good that he figured out a way to make an amplifier. Although it's rather complicated.
Mechanical logic used to be much more popular. Adding machines, calculators, and tabulating machines used it. So did railroad interlocking systems and race track totalizators.
A Model 14 or 15 Teletype machine's printer is a mechanical logic chain. It's a triggered clock driving an amplifying 5-bit shift register with latches. Those 5 bits are transferred in parallel to a 1 out of 32 decoder, where another level of mechanical amplification drives the typebars. None of the historical documents describe it that way, because there was no general language back then for talking about logic elements.
The simple way to make a mechanical digital amplifier is with an interposer. You have a "clock", a constantly rotating shaft, with a cam generating reciprocating motion. After the reciprocating part, there's a gap, and then something that needs to get pushed as the output. The interposer goes into the gap during the "off" part of the clock cycle, which takes little energy, and gets pushed by the high-powered reciprocating part. This can easily provide a gain of 10-100. This classic mechanism appears in many punching devices, from little ones punching holes in paper tape to big ones stamping out car bodies.
US patent 3659779, "Punch mechanism", assigned to IBM. This is how card punches worked. A little solenoid moved the interposer into position, while a big motor with a flywheel provided the punching power.
Mechanical logic used to be much more popular. Adding machines, calculators, and tabulating machines used it. So did railroad interlocking systems and race track totalizators.
A Model 14 or 15 Teletype machine's printer is a mechanical logic chain. It's a triggered clock driving an amplifying 5-bit shift register with latches. Those 5 bits are transferred in parallel to a 1 out of 32 decoder, where another level of mechanical amplification drives the typebars. None of the historical documents describe it that way, because there was no general language back then for talking about logic elements.
The simple way to make a mechanical digital amplifier is with an interposer. You have a "clock", a constantly rotating shaft, with a cam generating reciprocating motion. After the reciprocating part, there's a gap, and then something that needs to get pushed as the output. The interposer goes into the gap during the "off" part of the clock cycle, which takes little energy, and gets pushed by the high-powered reciprocating part. This can easily provide a gain of 10-100. This classic mechanism appears in many punching devices, from little ones punching holes in paper tape to big ones stamping out car bodies.