calculating machines, innovation, and thinking about thinking from Pascal to Babbage /
First Statement of Responsibility
Matthew L. Jones.
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.
London :
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
The University of Chicago Press,
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2016.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
331 pages :
Other Physical Details
illustrations ;
Dimensions
24 cm
INTERNAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES/INDEXES NOTE
Text of Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
Introduction -- Carrying tens: Pascal, Morland, and the challenge of machine calculation -- First carry : Babbage and Clement mechanize table making -- Artisans and their philosophers: Leibniz and Hooke coordinate minds, metal, and wood -- Second carry : Babbage gets funded -- Improvement for profit: calculating machines and the prehistory of intellectual property -- Third carry : Babbage claims his property -- Reinventing the wheel: emulation in the European enlightenment -- Fourth carry : Babbage confronts prior art -- Teething problems: Charles Stanhope and the coordination of technical knowledge from Geneva to Kent -- Fifth carry : Babbage's collaborators emulate -- Calculating machines, creativity, and humility from Leibniz to Turning -- Final carry : Epilogue.
0
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
"Tells the story of early modern European calculating machines, from the early attempts of Blaise Pascal in the 1640s through Charles Babbage{u2019}s efforts of the 1820s to 40s. All failed spectacularly. By exploring these failed technologies, Matthew L. Jones tracks diverse forms of technical life--different social arrangements of practitioners, different legal conceptions of the ownership of work and ideas, and different philosophical conceptions of knowledge and skill. Philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople wrote about their distinctive competencies, about technical novelty, and about the best way to coordinate their efforts, and drawing on these remarkably well-preserved records, Jones reveals the concrete processes of imagining, elaborating, testing, and building key components for calculating machines. By highlighting the makers and their conceptions of invention right up to the instauration of modern patent regimes and the solidification of the concept of Romantic genius, Jones argues that these conceptions of creativity and of making are often more incisive--and more honest--than those still dominating our own legal, political, and aesthetic culture."--Provided by publisher.