. Bulletin. Science. Figure 26.—Sylvester-Kempe trans- lating linkage, 1877. The upper and lower plates remain parallel and equidistant. From A. B. Kempe, How to Draw a Straight Line (London, i877> P- 37)- he had already devised square-root and cube-root extractors, an angle trisector, and a quadratic- binomial root extractor, and he could see no limits to the computing abilities of linkages as yet un- discovered.^" Sylvester recalled fondly, in a footnote to his lecture, his experience with a little mechanical of the Peaucellier linkage at an earlier dinner meeting of the Philo
. Bulletin. Science. Figure 26.—Sylvester-Kempe trans- lating linkage, 1877. The upper and lower plates remain parallel and equidistant. From A. B. Kempe, How to Draw a Straight Line (London, i877> P- 37)- he had already devised square-root and cube-root extractors, an angle trisector, and a quadratic- binomial root extractor, and he could see no limits to the computing abilities of linkages as yet un- discovered.^" Sylvester recalled fondly, in a footnote to his lecture, his experience with a little mechanical of the Peaucellier linkage at an earlier dinner meeting of the Philosophical Club of the Royal Society. The Peaucellier model had been greeted by the members with lively expressions of admiration "when it was brought in with the dessert, to be seen by them after dinner, as is the laudable custom among members of that eminent body in making known to each other the latest scientific ; And Sylvester would never forget the reaction of his brilliant friend Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) upon being handed the same model in the Athenaeum Club. After Sir William had operated it for a time, Sylvester reached for the model, but he was rebuffed by the exclamation "No! I have not had nearly enough of it—it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my ; =' The aftermath of Professor Sylvester's performance at the Royal Institution was considerable excitement amongst a limited company of interested mathemati- cians. Many alternatives to the Peaucellier straight-. Figure 27.—Gaspard Monge (1746-1818), professor of mathematics at the Ecole Poly- technique from 1794 and founder of the academic discipline of machine kinematics, From Livre du Centenaire, iyg4-i8g4, Ecole Polytechnique (Paris, 1895, vol. i, frontispece). line linkage were suggested by several writers of papers for learned journals.'^ In the summer of 1876, after Sylvester had departed from England to take up his post as professor of mathemati
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