This book studies mechanical calculating machines in the period before they became everyday commodities, from the attempts of Pascal in the 1640s through Babbage’s efforts in the 1820s-1840s. Through the optic of these failed technical artifacts, this books peers into diverse forms of technical life—social arrangements of practitioners, legal conceptions of the ownership of work and of ideas, philosophical conceptions of knowledge and skill. It brings to light the concrete processes of imagining, elaborating, testing, and building key components for calculating machines. Philosophers, engineer ... More

This book studies mechanical calculating machines in the period before they became everyday commodities, from the attempts of Pascal in the 1640s through Babbage’s efforts in the 1820s-1840s. Through the optic of these failed technical artifacts, this books peers into diverse forms of technical life—social arrangements of practitioners, legal conceptions of the ownership of work and of ideas, philosophical conceptions of knowledge and skill. It brings to light the concrete processes of imagining, elaborating, testing, and building key components for calculating machines. Philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople wrote about their distinctive competencies, technical novelty, and the best way to coordinate different sorts of technical practitioners. Their diverse written accounts helped promote and attack incipient notions of “intellectual property”; they reveal central features of aesthetic and legal debates of the early modern period. The book looks at conceptions of invention right up to the instauration of modern patent regimes and the solidification of the concept of Romantic genius. It highlights the varied early-modern ways of understanding and rewarding creative making that drew upon earlier creations, in the moment before imitation came to be seen as antithetical to original creation, rather than integral to the inventive process. 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. Reckoning with Matter uses the making of machines as a kind of recording instrument that tracks major contingencies of European early modernity, from its economic history to its vision of creative activity itself.