Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 79 of 171
Leibniz withdraws his binary essay
Leibniz came up with binary numbers in about 1679, when he wrote a letter to a colleague about a “new science of numbers” on which he was working. Leibniz was soon invited by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris to contribute to their new annual publication, the Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, which was more or less the equivalent of being published in the high-impact journals Science or Nature today. Leibniz was excited by the invitation and felt that, of all that he was working on, the concept of binary numbers was by far the most important. He wrote “Essay d’une Nouvelle Science des Nombres”—the first scientific paper ever on binary numbers—in 1701. The Royal Academy expressed interest in the idea, but they could not comprehend what binary numbers could be used for and now awaited “its applications with impatience.” In other words, they asked Leibniz to revise his essay because binary numbers seemed like a neat idea with no practical use. Leibniz realized that he would not have time to elaborate on his calculating machine before the publication deadline and, amazingly, wrote the Royal Academy asking them to withdraw his essay, which likely would have been published regardless. He wrote: “I thank you, sir, for withdrawing at my request my binary essay from the Histoire de l’Académie Royale. One must accommodate public taste, which wants to see palpable benefits.”