Machines · Difference Engine · Enigma and Turing's machine

Machines that explain themselves

Historic machines rebuilt in the browser, working, exact, and yours to turn.

Post on X Share on LinkedIn
A slice of Babbage's Difference Engine, its crank turning and a carry glowing up a column of figure wheels, with an Enigma machine in front of it lighting a lamp.A slice of Babbage's Difference Engine, its crank turning and a carry glowing up a column of figure wheels, with an Enigma machine in front of it lighting a lamp.A slice of Babbage's Difference Engine, its crank turning and a carry glowing up a column of figure wheels, with an Enigma machine in front of it lighting a lamp.

Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2

31-digit arithmetic, exact

Babbage designed it in the 1840s and never saw it built: eight columns of 31 figure wheels that add by turning a crank. Turn it here, watch a carry ripple up a column, or set it to print a table of logarithms.

Turn the crank 3D view

The Enigma and Turing's codebreaking machine

17,576 positions, 2 stops

Type on an Enigma I, then watch the Turing–Welchman machine find its key from one guessed word. Run the search, check its two stops and decrypt a German weather report in your browser.

Break the key 3D view

How these are made

Each machine is an isometric drawing written by a build script with Anatomy by wheresryan22, and these pictures with anatomy-asset by Teddarific; the glow follows April Zhu's iso-glow, the 3D views are three.js, and all of it was built with Claude Code.