“Innovative in its approach and its form, Reckoning with Matter offers a thoughtful and beautifully written history of technology that offers an important perspective on a division between two poles of writing the history of technology. Readers will not only enjoy a compelling account of machine calculation through the nineteenth century, but will also find the story of a frog that tears out the eyes of a fish, a man who designed machines for making breakfast, and discussions of the significance of credit and intellectual property, modern programming, sketching, imitation, and debates over the nature of thinking. Highly recommended!”

New Books Network

“Jones anchors his inquiry firmly in the material world by retelling the story of the failed efforts to create calculating machines from Blaise Pascal in the 1640s to Charles Babbage in the early nineteenth century. Yet, as Jones’ account brings to bear, the laborious and generally unsuccessful instantiation of these designs were possibly more revealing in themselves than had they succeeded. Jones sets out to challenge our deepest assumptions about the creative process otherwise too often held to oscillate between ‘the collective, deterministic account of inventive activity and the individualistic, heroic, creative account’. Instead, he offers an account which cuts through these bifurcations and seeks to relocate technological design and production in its social, cultural and political context…. [U]ndeniably a most useful contribution to the field.”

Global Intellectual History

“Reckoning with Matter provides a groundbreaking view into the archaeology of the thinking machine. Jones deftly takes us through the tricky materiality, tense negotiations, conceptual reconfigurations, and mechanical constraints faced by Pascal, Leibniz, the irascible Babbage, and many others in bringing their blueprints of calculating machines into reality. Before a machine could be made to do what every schoolchild now learns—how to carry a digit from one column of addition to another—the roles between philosophers, artisans, and mechanics had to be redefined, parts had to be standardized, and an entire cultural logic which prized emulation and gradual, collective improvement had to be replaced by the cult of the individual inventor. Going back over two and a half centuries before Turing, the meaning of thought, creativity, and the limits of the human were already at stake in the protracted efforts to build a machine that adds and subtracts. This fascinating journey through the material and mental workshops of a panoply of protocomputers and the politics of getting them built is much more than a formidable history of the early–modern roots of the digital age: it’s a boldly innovative, sophisticated, and eminently emulable example of how to make sense of the interwoven histories of science, labor, property, and technology.”

John Tresch, University of Pennsylvania

“Reckoning with Matter is a unique contribution to the history of calculating machines, their designers, the craftsmen who created them, and the interplay between the various groups. Jones not only details the inner workings of some of the machines but also provides a good look at some of the lesser–known creators such as Stanhope, Hahn, Müller, and others. With an extensive use of wonderful primary sources, Jones produces an insight that is rarely seen in the literature on calculating machines. Reckoning with Matter will fascinate.”

Michael R. Williams, emeritus, University of Calgary

“Jones offers a sharp new argument about the sources of creativity in science and technology. This history of early-modern calculating engines—carefully gleaned from the cryptic notes of savants like Leibniz and the sketches of their artisanal collaborators—shows how novelty was discovered ‘in the making’ and not through the imposition of thought on matter. The descriptions are vivid and offer fascinating insights into the ways such machines did (and didn’t!) work. In the process, the book tracks the fitful route by which ‘originality’ came to be the basis of intellectual property. Clever, detailed, and assembled with an originality all its own, Reckoning with Matter will certainly find an eager audience.”

Ken Alder, Northwestern University

“A fine study.”

Isis