ABSTRACT
Seventeenth-century natural philosophers devoted considerable attention to improved techniques of computation. Early in the century, John Napier (1550-1617) not only proposed a tool, known as Napier’s rods, for assisting in multiplication, but also discovered logarithms, providing the mathematical basis of the slide rule. In Italy, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) invented a military compass, or sector, for use in artillery computations. Later in the century, Claude Perrault (1613-1688) of the Parisian Academy of Sciences proposed an arrangement of sliding bars that could be used to keep track of the digits in addition and subtraction problems. Numerous nineteenth-century adders operated on Perrault’s principle.
