René Grillet

René Grillet was a watchmaker and mechanic in Paris. He invented a calculation box.

Little is known about his life, but he is said to have been a watchmaker for Louis XIV for a while . He is said to come from Rouen and was therefore also called René Grillet de Roven.

Possibly he was the son of the royal enameller and instrument maker Jean Grillet (1605–1675), author of a book La Beauté des plus belles dames de la cour .. (1648) and inventor of a thermometer.

He also invented other instruments such as the mercury barometer, over which he got into a priority dispute with the instrument maker Hubin in 1673 and later with Christiaan Huygens .

Grillet built a calculation box for the multiplication similar to Kaspar Schott in Würzburg, in which the Napier chopsticks were clearly arranged. It was briefly described by Grillet in 1678 in the Journal des Savants. The machine itself has not been preserved and the publication is not very detailed either, but it contains an illustration. Grillet states that the machine is based on John Napier's abacus , combining the wheels of Blaise Pascal's abacus with the cylindrical arrangement of Napier's bars by Pierre Petit (a mathematician and friend of Pascal). Grillet did not want to reveal too much about the internal structure and is said to have demonstrated his machine for a fee at fairs in France and the Netherlands between 1673 and 1681. He is said to have also produced and sold the calculation boxes, with what success is unknown.

He had already announced the invention in a little book that he published in 1673 (Curiositez mathématiques de l'invention du Sr Grillet, horlogeur à Paris). The book was confiscated by the Paris police, possibly due to a patent dispute over a barometer in which he was involved at the time.

In 1977 Michael Williams found instructions for the machine in the Crawford Library in Edinburgh in a manuscript that was once owned by Charles Babbage (and previously owned by Michel Chasles ). This description was not very detailed either, but it showed that it was a calculation box in the above sense and not a calculating machine (with interlocking gears, rollers or the like).

In 1681 he went to Amsterdam, where he stayed for several years, building instruments, demonstrating his calculator case and doing an apprenticeship with calico printers. He originally wanted to open a calico printing company in France, but since this was banned in 1686, he went to England, where he founded a calico printing company in the Deer Park of Richmond around 1690, the first in England.

literature

Michael R. Williams History of Computing Technology , IEEE Press 1997 (Chapter 3.6: René Grillet)
Michael R. Williams From Napier to Lucas. The use of Napier's Bones in calculating instruments , Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1983, pp. 279-296

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Grillet, René
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French watchmaker
DATE OF BIRTH	17th century
DATE OF DEATH	17th century or 18th century