The first serious suggestion that synchros could be used for machining control was made by Ernst F. W. Alexanderson, a Swedish immigrant to the U.S. working at General Electric (GE). Alexanderson had worked on the problem of torque amplification that allowed the small output of a mechanical computer to drive very large motors, which GE used as part of a larger gun laying system for US Navy ships. Like machining, gun laying requires very high accuracy – fractions of a degree – and the forces during the motion of the gun turrets was non-linear, especially as the ships pitched in waves.
