JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

[Image source: http://www.rechnerlexikon.de/artikel/Bild:Bollee-mit-Maschine-CNAM1990.jpg]

This was a surprise, finding M. Bollee’s article (“Sur une nouvelle machine a calculer”) in the 1889 Comptes Rendus, pecking 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. 

Notes:

Léon Bollée: “Sur une nouvelle machine a calculer”, in Comptes Rendus de l’Academie Sciences (Paris), volume 109, 1889, pp. 737-9.  (You can purchase the original paper if you’d like by following this link to our Books for Sale page, under “Bollee”.)

An image of the machine from The Manufacturer and Builder:

See:  the Making of America, http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=manu;cc=manu;rgn=full%20text;idno=manu0022-7;didno=manu0022-7;view=image;seq=0162;node=manu0022-7%3A21