Ideas also make machines. First rock, then wood: what material would supply the next advance in information processing? Bone. In the early seventeenth century, the Scottish mathematician John Napier discovered a way of changing the process of multiplication into addition. He carved ivory into bars, ruled marks corresponding to numbers on the bars, and then performed multiplication by sliding the bars alongside each other until the marks corresponding to the two numbers lined up. The total length of the two bars together then gave the product of the two numbers. The slide rule was born.
