If you do not get a lot of mail, you might be saying, wait! I thought the matter had been settled by treaty, and that the Electoral Prince of Bavaria was going to be King of Spain. But he has died, suddenly and strangely. The Empire has nominated its own candidate: Archduke Charles, the younger son of the Holy Roman Emperor. There is public talk of negotiations and partition-treaties, but private preparation for war. And as the stakes of that war will be Spain, the beating heart that circulates silver and gold through the world’s markets, we may expect that it will be harder-fought even than the last one.
But on to more interesting matters.
You say you would collaborate with me. I will try to dissuade you by mentioning two facts. First, it is now clear that you will be ostracized from the Royal Society if you associate your name with mine. Second, we will be working for a chap who has his minions broken on the wheel if they incur his displeasure. No, I am not talking about my new King of Prussia, but about a taller monarch who lives farther to the east and owns about half of the planet.
If I have not scared you away yet, then consider the nature of the work. The thing I want to make embodies very little that is beautiful or elegant mathematically. It will consist of two components: a mechanical system for performing arithmetickal and logical operations upon numbers, and a vast compendium of data that will inform the operations of that machine. Much work remains to be carried out on both of these fronts. The former promises more satisfaction, in that it is a practical pursuit, akin to Hooke’s watch-making, and one may see the machine take shape on the workbench, and point to this gear or that shaft with a measure of pride. But I fear it is not what really demands our attention now. Think of how the art of watch-making has advanced during our lifetimes alone, beginning with Huygens’s pendulums, &c., and extrapolate this into the future, and you will readily agree that arithmetickal engines will only get better with time. On the other hand--with due respect for the work that you and Wilkins did on the Philosophical Language--we have only just embarked upon the amassing of the data and the writing-out of the logical rules that will govern the machine’s workings.
You are the protégé of Wilkins and the only man still living who worked on that project; on his deathbed he passed his mantle on to you. It follows that you are the man best suited to assemble and organize the data that our machine shall require, and to place it in a form that may be read and understood by a machine. This is a matter of assigning prime numbers to the symbols and then encoding them in some medium, probably as binary digits. The medium needs to be something enduring, for it may be many generations before machines can be constructed that are capable of doing the work. Best would be thin sheets of gold.
For my part, I confess I have a thousand distractions, which conspire to make me a poor collaborator indeed. Any work that demands a vast amount of un-interrupted time is impossible for me—which is why I have suggested that you, alone in your quiet Massachusetts cabin, are better qualified to draw up the immense symbol-tables.
Setting aside political entanglements, calculus-controversies, and the three Ladies (Sophie, Sophie Charlotte, and Princess Caroline) who never stop asking me to explain things to them, my chief project, at the moment, is the monadology.
At any rate, what it comes down to is that my life for the next several years will consist of flying back and forth between Hanover and Berlin (with perhaps the occasional excursion to St. Petersburg!) trying to work out a beautiful set of logical rules. That matches well with the other part of the arithmetickal engine project, namely, writing down the set of rules that will govern how it processes symbols. As a matter of fact I should like to think that these two sets of rules—the one governing monads, the other governing the mechanical mind—will turn out to be one and the same. So I propose to take on this part of the undertaking myself, as it is so similar to what I am doing anyway.
That is my proposal for how we might collaborate, Daniel, and I hope it pleases you. The Tsar is fearsome it’s true, but he is far away from you, and extremely distracted putting down the Raskolniki and the Streltsy and making war on the Swedes. I do not think you need to fear him. Hard as it might be to believe, there is no monarch in the world more committed to advancing what you call the Technologickal Arts. I believe that if I were to ask him for a ton of gold, explaining that we wanted to use it to store data, he would hand it over in a moment. But first you and I need to come up with some data so that those plates will not remain as blank as Mr. Locke’s tabula rasa.
Yours affectionately,
Leibniz
Book 4
Bonanza
The Pacific Ocean
LATE 1700 AND EARLY 1701