text: In 1929, Hartree was appointed to the Beyer Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester. In 1933, he visited Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and learned first hand about his differential analyser. Immediately on his return to Manchester, he set about building his own analyser from Meccano. Seeing the potential for further exploiting his numerical methods using the machine, he persuaded Sir Robert McDougall to fund a more robust machine, which was built in collaboration with Metropolitan-Vickers.
  The first application of the machine, reflecting Hartree's enthusiasm for railways, was calculating timetables for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway. He spent the rest of the decade applying the differential analyser to find solutions of differential equations arising in physics, including control theory and laminar boundary layer theory in fluid dynamics, making significant contributions to each of the fields.
  The differential analyser was not suitable for the solution of equations with exchange. When Focks publication pre-empted Hartrees work on equations with exchange, Hartree turned his research to radio-wave propagation that led to the Appleton–Hartree equation. In 1935, his father, William Hartree, offered to do calculations for him. Results with exchange soon followed. Douglas recognised the importance of configuration interaction that he referred to as "superposition of configurations".
  The first multiconfiguration Hartree–Fock results were published by father, son, and Bertha Swirles (later Lady Jeffreys) in 1939.
  At Hartrees suggestion, Bertha Swirles proceeded to derive equations with exchange for atoms using the Dirac equation in 1935. With Hartrees advice, the first relativistic calculations (without exchange) were reported in 1940 by A. O. Williams, a student of R. B. Lindsay.