AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Blaise Pascal was a mathematician, a scientist, a philosopher, a Christian writer and the son of a tax collector in 17th century France. The family business involved a lot of tedious arithmetic, so Blaise Pascal came up with a machine - a wooden box with a series of dials connected to cogs and levers to help his dad with some of that adding and subtracting. He invented, basically, a calculator, and he was 19 years old.
Fast-forward a few centuries and one of the few such machines we have left is expected to fetch over 2-, maybe over $3 million when it's auctioned at Christie's in November. Well, for more, we have reached out to Eugenia Cheng, a mathematician and author and scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Welcome.
EUGENIA CHENG: Hi.
CHANG: Hi. OK, so these devices were called Pascalines, I understand. And they don't resemble the calculators that, like, you and I had in school as kids. How would you describe what these machines look like and how they worked?
CHENG: I would say that they are like bicycles compared with our calculators...
CHANG: (Laughter).
CHENG: ...Because one of the things I love about bicycles is you can look at them and kind of see them working.
CHANG: Yeah.
CHENG: And they involve things going round. And that's what this thing does. It's also a bit like an abacus. It has beads on rails.
CHANG: Right.
CHENG: And you have to move them yourself one by one. And every time you have finished moving all the beads on one rail, you have to do a carryover. Well, this machine does that for you, using cogs and wheels. And I love the idea that Pascal, at the age of 19, was just bored of doing the arithmetic for his dad at work.
CHANG: (Laughter) Yeah.
CHENG: And so he said, I don't want to do this anymore - just like any teenager would and should - and went, I'm going to make a machine instead that will do it for me.
CHANG: I mean, I love the irony of this, that a, like, math prodigy as a kid designs a machine that lets him circumvent the arithmetic (laughter).
CHENG: And there's a really important story in there, which is that arithmetic is not math. And Pascal was a prodigy at mathematics, and he was proving things and doing things he thought, I think, were much more fun than this boring arithmetic...
CHANG: Right.
CHENG: ...For his dad's tax work. And so he figured out how to use basically the technology of clocks and watches with the cogs going round to automate it.
CHANG: Cool. OK, so to do this baby stuff - this arithmetic - what kinds of calculations, basically, could a Pascaline actually perform?
CHENG: Very basic ones, as I understand it. So you can add up because you turn the dials to add numbers together, and then you can do multiplication because you turn the dials repeatedly. And there's a kind of sneaky way that you can use a little bit of theory to do subtraction as well. And that was about it. But that was already a really big deal for the epic quantities of arithmetic involved in doing tax calculations.
CHANG: OK. Well, I want to read you the press release from Christie's because I'm so curious what you think. It says, quote, that "the Pascaline is the first attempt in history to substitute the human mind with a machine. Its invention marks a breakthrough, a quantum leap." OK, is that an overstatement, or do you actually think that's a fair way to represent what the Pascaline was?
CHENG: Well, it's definitely a piece of marketing, isn't it?
CHANG: (Laughter) Yeah.
CHENG: But to say that it's trying to replace the human mind I do think is a little bit of an overstatement. I think Pascal was trying to get a machine to do something that he didn't want to have to do himself so that he could use his mind to do something more interesting, that he wanted more time to do. And I think that's generally what we are trying to get technology, and indeed AI, to do. We're not trying to replace human minds entirely, at least I'm not. But I love the idea of getting it to do the boring parts so that I can then go on to do the things that are more interesting.
CHANG: Yeah.
CHENG: And as for a quantum leap, well, it was a leap, and it was definitely an important first step towards modern computers. And that was such a long time ago that it's hard to say whether it was a direct link to modern computers, but you can trace an intellectual journey straight from there to the computers we have now.
CHANG: OK. Well, I just want to remind everyone that Pascal was just 19 years old when he invented the Pascaline. So I am curious, given the whole arc of his life, how does the invention of the Pascaline fit into the rest of his contributions in math and science, you think?
CHENG: Well, let's remember, not only was he only 19, but it was also 1642, which was quite a long time ago. And in those days, there was just less known at the time, so it was easier for people to become experts in many things. He also worked in philosophy. There was some fluid dynamics. And I think that his contemporaries considered the Pascaline to be his greatest invention. I don't know if he would have considered this his greatest invention because he wanted to get on to do more interesting and more important things and not get stuck doing arithmetic all the time. So anyone who doesn't like doing arithmetic, I would say take heart in that.
CHANG: That was Eugenia Cheng, scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thank you so much for speaking to us.
CHENG: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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