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Excerpt from Year Book: 1913-1914 We have in the department of commerce What I have called once the 'house of accuracy' in the shape of the great bureau of standards, with which I am sure many of you are familiar, and those of you who are so fond of being accurate yourselves would find there that we can quite match you in accuracy. We deal there with fragments of measurements so small that the human eye is quite incapable of seeing them; and, on the other hand, we can make visible to you, if you will allow us, the two-thousandth part of an inch. Or I might take you, if you are still in search of accuracy, to something in your own line, for we have here a machine beside which your best brains will not work. I would like to have any one of you gentlemen that is prepared to calculate Simultaneously from thirty-seven different factors, each derived from an average, giving an immediate result, to rise and stand before me. I do not see the volunteers coming forward; yet I should be glad to have you step up to the coast survey and be shown a machine that does that and produces printed answers - a machine which takes thirty-seven factors simultaneously, every one of those factors being itself an average, and variable, and gives a printed result of a mechanical calculation, which car ries us, I think, always at least a year into the future and com mouly two and three years, and yet upon which human life and navigation depend for accuracy. I do not know yet of a public accountant quite up to that machine. If there are any of you that are able, they will be employed, I have no doubt, at a good salary to replace the machine. It is a tide calculating machine. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, pres