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...nation. “There is not a single politician,” agreed the Spanish thinker Joaquin Xavier de Uriz, writing in 1801, “who does not accept the clear fact that the greatest possible number of law-abiding and hard-working men constitutes the happiness, strength and wealth of any state”. Statesmen and public-spirited individuals therefore devoted attention to building this healthy population. It was the productivity puzzle of the ......

...De Architectura’ by the Roman architect Virtruvius, who wrote in the 1st Century BC. ‘De Architectura’ covered both the theory and practice of building, and was the only technical treatise of its kind to have survived from antiquity. It became essential reference material for Renaissance architects. In some of Leonardo’s studies of proportions, his measurements...

...Menabrea’s description of the Analytical Engine ‘Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage’ from the original French. At first she was content to perform only the translation, but at Babbage’s instigation, she began to add extensive annotations to the original text. These ‘algebraic working’s are what we would now call a computer program – they were the commands that would be punched into Jacquard cards and fed......