Reckoning with Matter

Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage

Häftad, Engelska, 2026

679 kr

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From Blaise Pascal in the 1600s to Charles Babbage in the first half of the nineteenth century, inventors struggled to create the first calculating machines. All failed—but that does not mean we cannot learn from the trail of ideas, correspondence, machines, and arguments they left behind. In Reckoning with Matter, Matthew L. Jones draws on the remarkably extensive and well-preserved records of the quest to explore the concrete processes involved in imagining, elaborating, testing, and building calculating machines. He explores the writings of philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople, showing how they thought about technical novelty, their distinctive areas of expertise, and ways they could coordinate their efforts. In doing so, Jones argues that the conceptions of creativity and making they exhibited are often more incisive—and more honest—than those that dominate our current legal, political, and aesthetic culture.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-12-20
Mått152 x 229 x 28 mm
Vikt454 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor336
FörlagThe University of Chicago Press
ISBN9780226854465

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Introduction1 Carrying Tens: Pascal, Morland, and the Challenge of Machine Calculation First Carry Babbage and Clement Mechanize Table Making 2 Artisans and Their Philosophers: Leibniz and Hooke Coordinate Minds, Metal, and Wood Second Carry Babbage Gets Funded 3 Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property Third Carry Babbage Claims His Property4 Reinventing the Wheel: Emulation in the European Enlightenment Fourth Carry Babbage Confronts Prior Art 5 Teething Problems: Charles Stanhope and the Coordination of Technical Knowledge from Geneva to Kent Fifth Carry Babbage’s Collaborators Emulate 6 Calculating Machines, Creativity, and Humility from Leibniz to Turing Final Carry Epilogue Acknowledgments Conventions Abbreviations Notes References Index

"Rather than being yet another history of calculating machines, this book rises much higher by its scholarly examination, explanation, and interpretation of that history from the perspectives of computational mathematics, philosophy, logic, mechanical engineering capabilities, artisan skills, intellectual property, and the creative process itself. Starting from the primary difficulty of carrying tens on a mechanical device, the author provides an invigorating journey through the inventive process of calculating machines from 1600 to 1830, while introducing readers to the creations—ideas, justification, machines, and failures—of Pascal, Morland, Leibniz, Hooke, Babbage, Clement, and Stanhope. In each case, the author carefully details why the proposed models or dreams could not be realized as physical models, especially as marketable tools. The last chapter weighs the significance of 18th-century calculating machines on mathematics, as well as the processes of thinking and creation. The excellent chapter notes, reference list, and index complement the book. In summary, this book is exceptional and succeeds at its proposed task; more so, it offers both an approach and standard that more historians of technology should emulate—critically interweaving theory, practice, and results. Essential."