Matthew L. Jones. Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage.
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 123; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ahr/123.2.636
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)History of Science and Medicine
ResumoMatthew L. Jones’s Reckoning with Matter is at heart a treatise on the interplay between invention and human thought. The physical artifacts in which the material is rooted are the mechanical calculators, aspirational and actual, of early modern savants who sought to mechanize calculation in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The historical datum is the set of canonical episodes in the early history of automatic calculation, specifically attempts to contrive and manufacture working calculators, by Wilhelm Schickard, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Hooke, Samuel Morland, Giovanni Poleni, Johann Müller, Philipp Matthäus Hahn, Charles Stanhope, and Charles Babbage. The level of detail of mechanisms and of arithmetical processes is finely judged: there is sufficient description to appreciate design and implementation issues without an internalist treatment overwhelming the broader debate. Technical descriptions are illustrated using contemporary drawings and photographs of artifactual relics. Techniques for the carriage of tens in arithmetical addition, perennially problematic even in the electronic era, are an example. The blending of the two discourses, technical and cultural, is deft and is a refreshingly distinctive feature of the work.
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