“I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.”

—  Eric Temple Bell

Source: Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (1938), p. 274
Context: Some, of my unmathematical friends have incautiously urged me to include a note about the origin of modern calculating machines. This is the proper place to do so, as the Queen of queens has enslaved a few of these infernal things to do some of her more repulsive drudgery. What I shall say about these marvelous aids to the feeble human intelligence will be little indeed, for two reasons: I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.

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Eric Temple Bell14
mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland w… 1883–1960

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