JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
It was a surprise, finding M. Bollee’s article (“Sur une nouvelle machine a calculer”) in this 1889 Comptes Rendus, peeking around in that big 10-pound volume looking for something else. It was very easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it, just a few pages long in a 1000-page book. But there it was, nestled comfortably in pp 737-739. It these few pages Bollee describes his machine and with particular reference to his innovative approach to direct multipilication–a fine addition (ha!) to the long line of contributions by Babbage and Clement, Scheutz, Wiberg and Grant and Hamann.
The article in the Comptes Rendus is not illustrated, though I did find an image of the machine in The Manufacturer and Builder:
