Clan Napier

In the spring of 1614, in the upper turret of Merchiston Tower south of Edinburgh, John Napier, eighth Laird of Merchiston, in his sixty-fourth year, in the twentieth year of work on the project, finished the manuscript of Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio, the description of the wonderful canon of logarithms, and sent it to the Edinburgh printer Andrew Hart for setting. The book came out in July of the same year. Henry Briggs, professor of mathematics at Gresham College, read it in London in November and crossed the Tweed in the summer of 1615 to come and see Napier at Merchiston. Within a generation the table of logarithms had taken navigation, astronomy and surveying off the arithmetic by hand, and was, by Galileo's observation in his 1632 Dialogue, the greatest invention of the last hundred years. Napier was a Lothian Protestant laird who had spent ten years on a hostile commentary on the Book of Revelation, who had patented a hydraulic screw for clearing coal pits, who had drafted four conceptual war-machines for the defence of Scotland against Spanish invasion, and whose neighbours in the Edinburgh suburbs had decided he was a wizard and his black rooster was his familiar. The most consequential mathematical work of seventeenth-century Britain came out of his turret in his late middle age.

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