Computing mechanises knowledge. For some people this continues to be controversial. In recent years, some of this controversy has centred on the Digital Humanities, though attempts to defend the human in historiography go back further. There is a fear of an age where new electronic resources make it possible to do literary research without reading at all or in which digitisation leads to the decline of the sacred. The purpose of this chapter is to cast this debate in a historical perspective by looking back to an earlier mechanisation of knowledge in the form of uniform, arithmetic representations of historical time. Principally from the eighteenth century, these diagrams predate mechanised computing by almost a century, but are driven by a similar enthusiasm for the mechanical – reflected in the concepts of automated cognition and mechanistic knowledge structures, set in a broader mechanical culture – perhaps the first emergence of a machine aesthetic.