Yes - we CAN do computers!
When we show books in the Hurd Library we usually tell visitors we can cover almost every subject - apart from football, motor cars and computers. That was until Penny Greenwood, working on her conservation survey one day, got to this book:
There were 6 volumes of it! With memories of dull maths lessons at school Penny resigned herself to a few tedious hours looking for damaged pages, always assuming Bishop Hurd had bothered to read it. Then, in volume 4, she found these 2 plates:
They illustrate the adding machine designed in 1642 by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). France’s most celebrated mathematician, he began his career as a child prodigy. His father was a supervisor of taxes in Rouen and Blaise worked with him in his office. Fed up with the laborious calculations involved he invented a machine to help, which became known as the Pascaline. It could do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. He built 20 machines and 9 of them survive, including 4 in Paris and 2 in Clermont Ferrand, his birthplace. There had actually been a predecessor, designed in 1623 by Wilhelm Schikard (1592-1635). He designed a calculating clock, which could add and subtract 6 digit numbers, but it was destroyed before completion and the designs were lost until the 19th century. So Pascal has the glory of making the first step towards computers and when we show the book to visitors they often exclaim “Bletchley Park!”
For this lovely discovery we are indebted to the book’s compiler, Francis Maseres (1731-1824). He was of Huguenot descent, studied maths at Clare College Cambridge and also studied law. He was appointed Attorney General in Quebec in 1766, but managed to upset both the merchants and the militia so he was given permanent leave of absence and went home to enjoy a life of bachelor leisure in the Temple. He was found a job as Cursitor Baron of the Exchequer at £300-£400 a year but this was a virtual sinecure. He was often referred to as Baron Maseres however. An evident eccentric, he spoke the French of Louis XIV’s reign and wore clothes from the time of George II. He evidently knew Bishop Hurd and favoured him with a copy of his collection of essays on logarithms; Hurd duly inscribed it:
An additional benefit of this inscription is that we now know the library stamp was in use by 1793.
The book has other illustrations too - for example some nice pictures of boats:
But they will have to wait until we find out what they have to do with logarithms.
Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian









