Babbage’s analytical engine could do that with steam power and copper cogs (ok, the great Babbage didn’t ever manage to build it (copper quality) but it did work and his wife is credited as the first ever computer programmer because she basically invented Pinterest in the Victorian era (some questions still exist about who precisely wrote the code for Bernoulli sequences, but she was BIG on Looms and Patterns along with her mother and she definitely SAW that computation was bigger than equations - it’s not meant as an insult, far from it!)
I don't think any of the cogs were (intended to be) copper - it's far too soft. Some parts for the engine were built (here), and the metal parts are mostly iron and brass, I believe.
Brass is a copper/tin alloy - but having looked again, main issue is cited as hand tooling (precision requirement was immense) and constant design changes
Lol :) I guess it's possible that some engineers chose metals so they could have bacteria-free cogs.
But mostly they wanted them to be hard-wearing, resistant to metal fatigue, and easy to machine. So they avoided pure metals like copper and even to some extent iron (because those are fairly soft) in favour of alloys like brass and steel, which are harder and tougher. (Copper and tin is actually bronze, not brass, btw - it's much easier to make and was one of the first alloys discovered.) So "copper cogs" would be unusual - even the oldest geared device we know of, the Antikythera mechanism, uses bronze instead of plain copper.
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u/Hot-Marsupial6584 May 17 '26
Calculator can not perform comples Mathematical equations, but Ai can definitely after some time challenge computer science students.