Marble Adding Machine
MAKE A MECHANICAL, GRAVITY-POWERED, BINARY CALCULATOR THAT USES WOODEN LEVERS AND CHANNELS TO COUNT.
BY MATTHIAS WANDEL
Photograph by Garry McLeod
Computers add binary numbers constantly, but we never see how. This elegant machine does the math using glass marbles.
I started building marble track machines years ago using Lego. I experimented with all sorts of crazy ways for the marbles to descend. One was a rocker that shunted a stream of dropping marbles one-by-one to alternating sides. If you cascade three of these toggles down to the left, every marble flips the rightmost toggle, every second marble flips the middle toggle, ...
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