Through a relative, Commander William Goodenough, Pollen saw a naval gunnery practice near Malta in 1900, and the accuracy was so poor that even at ranges of less than a mile the big guns could not reliably hit their targets.Pollen 'Gunnery' p. 23 On the board of the Linotype Company at the time was Lord Kelvin, widely regarded as Britain's leading scientist. It was Kelvin who proposed using an analogue computer to solve the equations which arise from the relative motion of the ships engaged in the battle and the time delay in the flight of the shell to calculate the required trajectory and therefore the direction and elevation of the guns. Kelvin's brother James Thomson was responsible for producing a tidal analyser using a ball, disc and cylinder differential analyser which was the original source of the suggested analogue computer.Pollen 'Gunnery' p. 35
