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.
About the Author
Matthew L. Jones is the James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the Department of History at Columbia University and the author of "The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution", also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"'Reckoning with Matter' provides a groundbreaking view into the archaeology of the thinking machine. Jones deftly takes us through the tricky materiality, tense negotiations, conceptual reconfigurations, and mechanical constraints faced by Pascal, Leibniz, the irascible Babbage, and many others in bringing their blueprints of calculating machines into reality. Before a machine could be made to do what every schoolchild now learns – how to carry a digit from one column of addition to another – the roles between philosophers, artisans, and mechanics had to be redefined, parts had to be standardized, and an entire cultural logic which prized emulation and gradual, collective improvement had to be replaced by the cult of the individual inventor. Going back over two and a half centuries before Turing, the meaning of thought, creativity, and the limits of the human were already at stake in the protracted efforts to build a machine that adds and subtracts. This fascinating journey through the material and mental workshops of a panoply of protocomputers and the politics of getting them built is much more than a formidable history of the early–modern roots of the digital age: it's a boldly innovative, sophisticated, and eminently emulable example of how to make sense of the interwoven histories of science, labor, property, and technology" – John Tresch, University of Pennsylvania
"'Reckoning with Matter' is a unique contribution to the history of calculating machines, their designers, the craftsmen who created them, and the interplay between the various groups. Jones not only details the inner workings of some of the machines but also provides a good look at some of the lesser-known creators such as Stanhope, Hahn, Muller, and others. With an extensive use of wonderful primary sources, Jones produces an insight that is rarely seen in the literature on calculating machines. 'Reckoning with Matter' will fascinate" – Michael R. Williams, emeritus, University of Calgary
"Jones offers a sharp new argument about the sources of creativity in science and technology. This history of early-modern calculating engines – carefully gleaned from the cryptic notes of savants like Leibniz and the sketches of their artisanal collaborators – shows how novelty was discovered 'in the making' and not through the imposition of thought on matter. The descriptions are vivid and offer fascinating insights into the ways such machines did (and didn't!) work. In the process, the book tracks the fitful route by which 'originality' came to be the basis of intellectual property. Clever, detailed, and assembled with an originality all its own, 'Reckoning with Matter' will certainly find an eager audience" – Ken Alder, Northwestern University
