TITLE: Mathematical computer desk
QUESTION [6 upvotes]: D. Gibb, from the Mathematical Laboratory, University of Edinburgh,
describes a Computer Desk in his book A course in interpolation and numerical integration for the
mathematical laboratory, G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1915, available here:
Where computation is performed to any considerable extent, computer's desk will be found useful. Those used in the mathematical laboratory of the University of Edinburgh are 3' 0" wide, 1'9" from front to back, and 2'6  1/2" high. They contain a locker, in wich computing paper can be kept without being folded, and a cupboard for books, papers, drawing-board, arithmometer, or instruments. Each desk is supplied with a copy of Barlow's tables (which gives the square, square root, cube, cube root and the reciprocal of all numbers up to 10,000), a copy of Creller's multiplication table (which gives at sight the product of any two numbers each less than 1000), and
tables giving the values of the trigonometric functions and logarithms
Question: Are there any available picture of this "computer desk" ?


I think that this may be the first recorded description of an workplace for numerical analysts...

REPLY [7 votes]: A little googling led to http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/EMS_1913_Colloquium.html which quotes at length a report that appeared in The Mathematical Gazette in 1913, including the following:

...Professor Whittaker held his séances
  in the large basement hall, which has
  recently been fitted up as a
  mathematical laboratory. This, indeed,
  was the first occasion on which it had
  been used. Each student was provided
  with a specially designed desk, with a
  convenient book-rest fixed to the
  back, and with drawers and shelves for
  storing note-books, scribbling paper,
  graph paper, and books to aid
  calculation, such as Barlow's Tables
  and Crelle's Rechentafeln. At these
  desks learned professors, lecturers,
  teachers, and a few students, nearly
  eighty in all, totted up their columns
  of figures and drew their
  periodographs, and were quite elated
  when their totals came out right.

Finally, although it's about copyists rather than computers, I can't resist citing a little excerpt on ergonomics, from Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener":

Though of a very ingenious mechanical
  turn, Nippers could never get this
  table to suit him. He put chips under
  it, blocks of various sorts, bits of
  pasteboard, and at last went so far as
  to attempt an exquisite adjustment by
  final pieces of folded blotting-paper.
  But no invention would answer. If, for
  the sake of easing his back, he
  brought the table lid at a sharp angle
  well up towards his chin, and wrote
  there like a man using the steep roof
  of a Dutch house for his desk:—then he
  declared that it stopped the
  circulation in his arms. If now he
  lowered the table to his waistbands,
  and stooped over it in writing, then
  there was a sore aching in his back.
  In short, the truth of the matter was,
  Nippers knew not what he wanted. Or,
  if he wanted any thing, it was to be
  rid of a scrivener’s table altogether.