Written in 1855, Histoire des nombres et de la numération mécanique traces humanity’s long apprenticeship with number: the birth of counting, the numeral systems of the nations, and the rise of mechanical reckoning from the abacus to Pascal’s arithmetic machine and beyond.
Jacomy-Régnier writes for the curious general reader of the Second Empire, and his history arrives just before the machines took over in earnest. Download the free EPUB, in French, for the story of number told when calculation was still handmade.