John Napier was a fanatic Scottish hill climber. So much so he suffered frostbite frequently and lost most of his fingers and all his toes. As any good 17th Century polymath would, he kept the chopped-off extremeties.
In plotting the heights of Scottish mountains and hills he had climbed, he noticed a curved, not linear line.
In the process of playing with forumulae to explain this phenomenon, he invented what we now call logarithms. To demonstrate his invention to his colleague, Kenneth Watt (James Watt's great, great grandfather) he grabbed the nearest jar of collectibles and spread them out in the same curve. These collectibles were his very own toe and finger bones.
It was Kenneth Watt who first published a paper about this and referred to Napier's bones being used in mathematics.
It was 18 years before anyone repeated the work; the use of human body parts in science was a capital offence and it was that long before Napier's son, Wilberforce, thought of using the bones of apes instead. These were collected from the Royal Zoological Gardens at Kew as such creatures died until Wilberfoce had enough to be able to repeat his father's demonstration at the Royal Institution in London.
By this time the name Napier's Bones had stuck; the technique was not referred to as logarithms until the 1930s.
In plotting the heights of Scottish mountains and hills he had climbed, he noticed a curved, not linear line.
In the process of playing with forumulae to explain this phenomenon, he invented what we now call logarithms. To demonstrate his invention to his colleague, Kenneth Watt (James Watt's great, great grandfather) he grabbed the nearest jar of collectibles and spread them out in the same curve. These collectibles were his very own toe and finger bones.
It was Kenneth Watt who first published a paper about this and referred to Napier's bones being used in mathematics.
It was 18 years before anyone repeated the work; the use of human body parts in science was a capital offence and it was that long before Napier's son, Wilberforce, thought of using the bones of apes instead. These were collected from the Royal Zoological Gardens at Kew as such creatures died until Wilberfoce had enough to be able to repeat his father's demonstration at the Royal Institution in London.
By this time the name Napier's Bones had stuck; the technique was not referred to as logarithms until the 1930s.
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