Philip Woodworth, 23 May 2017
There is a lot of renewed interest in tide prediction machines and, after many years hidden away in storerooms, some of the machines made in the UK are on permanent display once again. Kelvin’s original 10-component machine is now part of the new Winton Gallery for Mathematics at the Science Museum in London alongside Ishiguro’s storm surge simulator. Two of the machines that were used at Bidston can now be seen at the National Oceanography Centre building in Brownlow Street in Liverpool.
As you may know from articles mentioned in the Resources section of this web site, the tide prediction machines were a way of simulating the tide in terms of its many harmonic components. Each component would be represented by an amplitude and phase lag, called the ‘harmonic constants’, and the machine, which can be considered as a sort of analogue computer, would be programmed to run by providing it with these constants. Of course, the constants would differ from port to port.
That raises the obvious question of where people like Arthur Doodson, and the other operators of the machines, got their constants from in the first place. This short article reviews the main characteristics of one of the machines (the so-called Doodson-Légé machine now on display at NOC) and then attempts to answer the question of how Doodson obtained the constants.
Continue reading “Finding the Amplitudes and Phases to use for the Bidston Tide Prediction Machines”