" Reckoning with Matter provides a groundbreaking view into the archaeology of the thinking machine. Jones deftly takes us through the tricky materiality, tense negotiations, conceptual reconfigurations, and mechanical constraints faced by Pascal, Leibniz, the irascible Babbage, and many others in bringing their blueprints of calculating machines into reality. Before a machine could be made to do what every schoolchild now learns--how to carry a digit from one column of addition to another--the roles between philosophers, artisans, and mechanics had to be redefined, parts had to be standardized, and an entire cultural logic which prized emulation and gradual, collective improvement had to be replaced by the cult of the individual inventor. Going back over two and a half centuries before Turing, the meaning of thought, creativity, and the limits of the human were already at stake in the protracted efforts to build a machine that adds and subtracts. This fascinating journey through the material and mental workshops of a panoply of protocomputers and the politics of getting them built is much more than a formidable history of the early-modern roots of the digital age: it's a boldly innovative, sophisticated, and eminently emulable example of how to make sense of the interwoven histories of science, labor, property, and technology.".