M chapter.indd - Charles Babbage Institute

822
Erwin Tomash Library
Mabbut, George MacColl, LeRoy Archibald
These tables were not authored by Isaac Newton. While
Newton was at Trinity College, the college had a dispute
with a lessee, and Newton calculated tables showing the
amount due when leases of college lands were renewed.
Mabbut’s first edition of 1686 carried an endorsement
from Newton, and thereafter Newton’s name became
associated with this publication. When Thomas Astley
took over publishing (for the third edition), he, apparently
as a marketing maneuver, gave Newton’s name a more
prominent position on the title page. The lease tables
occupy the first half of the volume, and tables of interest
compose the last half of the work.
An advertisement to the reader follows the lease tables
proper and serves as an introduction to a thirty-page
note, in the form of a letter, considering the advantages
of church and college leases. This advertisement warns
the reader that the following note had been wrote and
published long before the unhappy South-Sea Scheme
was known; and consequently, the Writer… could not be
influenced by the extravagant Price that was given for
Land, whilst the public Frenzy lasted—a reference to an
early market bubble and the crash that followed it.
Illustrations available:
Title page
M 4
MacColl, LeRoy Archibald (1896–)
Fundamental theory of servomechanisms
Year: 1945
Place: New York
Publisher: D. Van Nostrand
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Binding: original cloth boards
Pagination: pp. 130
Size: 229x150 mm
MacColl was a member of staff at Bell Telephone
Laboratories.
This work started out as a paper written at the request
of Warren Weaver, chief of the Applied Mathematics
Panel of the National Defense Research Committee
(NDRC) (essentially the group directing scientific
research in the U.S. during World War II). It soon grew to
book length, and a decision was made to publish it while
it still had value for the war effort. As the title implies,
it is less practical, and more theoretical, than other such
publications (see, for example, Lauer, Henri, et al.;
Servomechanism fundamentals, 1947). Warren Weaver
wrote an introduction in which he makes this statement,
perhaps indicative of the times:
The control art is an old one. With the broadest
definition, it is a very ancient art; for one supposes
that if Adam wished to control Eve’s vocal output,
he had simple mechanisms, such as a wellbalanced
club, with which he doubtless brought it
down a goodly number of decibels.
Illustrations available:
Title page
M 3 M 4