Tinkerers Ever to Chance: Engineers, Computers, and the Rise of Probablistic Thinking

Abstract

Historians of scientific thought and philosophy have emphasized during the Enlightenment a shift from chance-based medieval thought to probability-based modern thought. They have not, however, focused on the technology that makes the implementation of such thought possible. At the same time, historians of computing have emphasized the rise of mechanical calculators—predecessors of modern computers—in this same period, but only in reference to solving practical problems arising from increasingly complex societies. This paper will draw on the two different streams of historical thought to show how the rise of probability and statistics and the rise of mechanical calculating devices were inextricably linked in complex ways.