Maybe I have come late to this conversation ... but I vaguely remember that Maurice Wilkes was initially put in charge of Cambridge's University's Mathematical Laboratory http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/relics/history.html which: - had several mechanical machines for solving differential equations, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser, and - maybe Meccano was involved too. There are several non-Babbage mechanical computers in the Science Museum in London (but maybe not now on show), and ... Jack Howlett wrote a book on early pre-electronic computers, maybe a translation from the original French. Sadly, I cannot immediately identify the book that Jack published. MIT Press might have been the publisher. Maybe it was 'The computer comes of age'. Guy