Stullen had no problem making such a program, and used it to produce large tables of numbers that would be taken onto the machine floor. The resulting tool would be useful as a template for stamping metal stringers. If you cut at each of those points, it would produce a relatively accurate cutout of the stringer even in hard steel, and it could easily be filed down to a smooth shape. When Parsons saw what Stulen was doing with the punched card machines, he asked Stulen if they could be used to generate an outline with 200 points instead of the 17 they were given, and offset each point by the radius of a mill cutting tool.
Stulen decided to adopt the idea to run stress calculations on the rotors, the first detailed automated calculations on helicopter rotors. Stulen's brother worked at Curtis Wright Propeller, and mentioned that they were using punched card calculators for engineering calculations. However, the concept was ahead of its time from a business development perspective, and GE did not take the matter seriously until years later, when others had pioneered the field. He stated that it was a "matter of straight engineering development". In November 1931 Alexanderson suggested to the Industrial Engineering Department that the same systems could be used to drive the inputs of machine tools, allowing it to follow the outline of a template without the strong physical contact needed by existing tools like the Keller Machine. Like machining, gun laying requires very high accuracies, much less than a degree, and the forces during the motion of the gun turrets was non-linear. 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. Alexanderson, a Swedish immigrant to the U.S. The first serious suggestion that selsyns could be used for machining control was made by Ernst F.