About Daniel
I am Daniel, an independent researcher based in Asia with a long-standing fascination for the machines that predicted the sea before computers existed. The Tide Engine Archive is my personal project to document the mechanical tide predictors built between 1872 and 1968 — the brass-and-steel computers that kept ports safe.
How I research
- Primary sources first. Observatory annual reports, engineering society transactions, patent filings, and operator logbooks — not rewritten encyclopedia entries.
- Museums and collections. I track surviving machines (London, Washington, Hamburg, Bidston, Liverpool) and photograph nameplates, gear trains, and paper rolls where access allows.
- Redrawn, never copied. Every diagram on this site is hand-coded SVG drawn by me from mechanism descriptions, so you can inspect the geometry yourself.
- Corrections welcome. If you spot an error in a date, a ratio, or a name, tell me — I publish corrections with credit.
Why this archive exists
The tide-predicting machine is one of the great forgotten chapters of computing history. Most explanations stop at "Kelvin invented it" — but the real story spans ninety years, dozens of machines, rival schools in Britain, America, and Germany, and operators who spent careers turning cranks. I want that story preserved in plain English, with working diagrams, before the paper records fade.
What I'm working on now
The archive grows in three directions: completing the census of surviving machines (several are still untraced — see my losses ledger), transcribing operator logbooks into the setup reconstruction, and drawing the remaining mechanisms as SVG. New articles appear on the articles page as research lands; nothing here is on a content calendar, because archives don't keep schedules.
Colophon
This site is hand-built with Astro as a fully static publication — no trackers, no frameworks, no stock imagery. Every diagram is original SVG drawn by me; every article is written by me from primary sources. Corrections are published with credit. The site carries no advertising today; if that ever changes, it will be disclosed in the Terms of Use first.
Contact
Use the contact form for corrections, museum tips, or permission requests. I read everything personally.