Most of you will know of the “Phillips machine,” better called, as Mary
Morgan suggests, the “Newlyn-Phillips machine,” a hydraulic model of a
national economy.  It has a good literature, and while no complete
mechanical description has been published, there are a couple of surviving
machines one can examine.

But there was another machine.  In 1952, Phillips designed and built a
mechanical device to link two national-economy machines, at either fixed or
floating exchange rates, producing a two-country international economy
model.  He seems to have done this as a one-off for James Meade, who used
it in his LSE seminar from 1952 to 1957.

Linking two machines at a *fixed* exchange rate is fairly simple.  This is
what was done, on Meade’s instructions, for a 1991 demonstration at LSE.
There's good documentation.  Linking at a *floating* rate is harder, and
it’s not obvious how he did it.  Apart from three 1952 photographs, I have
found no documentation of the Phillips foreign exchange machine in the LSE
archives.  The physical device seems lost, as are Phillips’ drawings.

Any suggestions?  One possibility might be to find surviving students from
Meade’s 1953-57 seminar with good mechanical memories, and I’d be grateful
for any leads there.  Aside from the purely mechanical part, this connects
to Meade’s policy interest in flexible rates during the 1950s.
Thanks, Colin

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Colin Danby
Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
University of Washington, Bothell
(425) 352-5285
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The Known Economy: Romantics, Rationalists, and the Making of a World Scale
<https://www.routledge.com/The-Known-Economy-Romantics-Rationalists-and-the-Making-of-a-World-Scale/Danby/p/book/9781138123496>
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