I was a graduate student in International economics at the LSE from 1953-55 before joining the staff there and working closely with Bill Philips on my Phillips curve paper. I attended James Mead’s graduate seminar while a student and we had several demonstrations with the two country machine. He would appoint students to be chancellors of the exchequers and governors of the central banks, giving us the relevant levers and allowing us to discover for ourselves how difficult it was to follow an effective  stabilisation policy in  economies with all of his lags and also interconnections to a second economy.

Sadly I have only a fuzzy recollection of the internal working of the machine as opposed to is performance which was stunning. The only to other surviving member that I know of is Max Cordon who might have a better understanding of the machine’s mechanics that I did then and can remember now.

Sorry that I cannot be of more help

Richard Lipsey

From: Societies for the History of Economics <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Colin Danby
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2018 11:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SHOE] Phillips' lost machine

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
[log in to unmask]
The Known Economy: Romantics, Rationalists, and the Making of a World Scale
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