Reckoning with Matter : Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage / Matthew L. Jones.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jones, Matthew L., Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Calculators--History.

Calculators.

Computers--History.

Computers.

Technology--History.

Technology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (340 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1. Carrying Tens: Pascal, Morland, and the Challenge of Machine Calculation

2. Artisans and Their Philosophers: Leibniz and Hooke Coordinate Minds, Metal, and Wood

3. Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property

4. Reinventing the Wheel: Emulation in the European Enlightenment

5. Teething Problems: Charles Stanhope and the Coordination of Technical Knowledge from Geneva to Kent

6. Calculating Machines, Creativity, and Humility from Leibniz to Turing

Acknowledgments

Conventions

Abbreviations

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2016.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

Other Format:

Print version :

OCLC:

963935713