Gunpowder and Geometry: The Life of Charles Hutton, Pit Boy, Mathematician and Scientific Rebel. Benjamin Wardhaugh
was involved as a calculator in this period. Male-dominated but not male-exclusive worlds, then, as far as the evidence goes. The glimpse Hutton’s manuscripts provide of the participation of his family suggests that women’s roles may have been more substantial than we think, more than we can usually see. That, when we read a publication by ‘Charles Hutton’, we’re not hearing his individual voice alone but a composite, in which other voices from his household, both male and female, are involved.
Meanwhile, the calculations were done. Hutton added an enormous preface, setting out the history of logarithms and their calculation over the previous two hundred years and detailing how his own tables had been calculated and how to use them. More than anything he had done so far, the preface attempted to establish him as more than a mere technician; someone who was not only good at mathematics but knowledgeable about the subject in a humane, humanistic way. A vast range of reading was displayed; information from two centuries was synthesised and formed into a narrative. Judgements were passed, credit was assigned or reassigned. Hutton, here, was reinventing himself as an authority on the history of mathematics, on its nature; and perhaps even an authority on where mathematics should go next, what it was useful for, why it mattered.
There were delays in the calculating work, for reasons we shall hear about in Chapter 6, and there were delays in printing the book, when Hutton insisted on a demanding programme of checking that entailed comparing each proof sheet with the manuscript several times. Almost certainly, other members of his household were involved once again. He was evidently confident of their work; and in a printed list of errata he admitted to only seven mistakes in the logarithm tables when they finally appeared.
The tables were admired by reviewers; it was hard to see how one could do much else, since time alone would determine whether they were really as accurate as Hutton said. On the whole it seems they were, and they remained in print until 1894, through thirteen editions. Like Hutton’s table of powers they became part of the standard set of books loaned by Maskelyne to Nautical Almanac
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