Planimeter

planimeter, mathematical instrument for directly measuring the area bounded by an irregular curve, and hence the value of a definite integral.

The first such instrument, employing a disk-and-wheel principle to integrate, was invented in 1814 by J.H. Hermann, a Bavarian engineer. Improved mechanisms were invented by the British mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1855) and the Scottish engineer James Thomson (1876). So far as is known, Maxwell never actually built a working model of his invention, which he called a platometer, but Thomson’s principle was not only applied in planimeters but adapted by his brother, the physicist William Thomson (later 1st Baron Kelvin), for a machine used in harmonic analysis of tides. A practical, inexpensive polar planimeter was invented by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Amsler about 1854. It consists of a pole arm, or bar, which has a weight at one end, and a tracer arm, the end of which has a point that the operator guides around the boundary of the area in question. Both arms rest in a carriage that moves as the tracer arm is moved; a vernier wheel within the carriage provides directly the area that is measured, calibration of vernier and area units being undertaken at the outset. See also integrator.