The Cheese Computer

Probably the best comment we’ve heard about this IBM cheese cutting machine is “The slicer was free, but sharpening the blade cost $250.”

Though technically IBM wasn’t their name until 1924, it’s an early example of the company that was to become the computer giant’s exploration of mechanical computation. It is quite an ingenious piece of machinery, and was a remarkably common part of shops across North America at the beginning of the 20th Century, though there is no evidence of one in use at our own little McKeen store (although mass-produced, they were a bit of a prestige item, like cash registers and computing scales of the time).

The machine uses a pair of levers and a system of gearing to precisely rotate a cheese wheel based on the original weight of the cheese and the desired weight of the slice. One lever is set to the wheel’s starting weight, the other to the slice’s target weight. The mechanism then calculates and rotates the wheel to the correct angle before cutting, ensuring accurate wedge sizes and consistent pricing. Seems pretty straightforward today, but it was a pretty big deal in 1907.