Integrators as Parts

Sometimes—as when aiming a gun from the deck of a ship—integration was only a small part of what a computing system did. In 1912, as a graduate student at Tufts University, Vannevar Bush designed a surveying instrument called a profile tracer that included an integrator. Later the Ford Instrument Company used a range of integrators in devices it built for the U.S. Navy from the time of World War I into the 1960s. A few of these are shown in this section. Another integrator was designed by Foxboro Company, of Foxboro, Massachusetts for use with its instruments for tracking fluid flow.