Letter 2894

Monsieur Perrault, who recently translated ‘Vitruvius’, claims to have invented a machine ‘which he thinks will act without friction’. Desaguliers states that he ‘can both demonstrate mathematically, and experimentally by Modells wherein he [Perrault] is deceiv’d’ and sees it as his duty to show ‘what it is that leads People in to those kinds of mechanical Mistakes’. Desaguliers was the son of French Huguenots who quit France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). He was a natural philosopher and engineer, became Sir Isaac Newton’s pupil, was a proponent of Newtonianism, and performed lectures and experiments at the Royal Society (Patricia Fara, Desaguliers, John Theophilus (16831744), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7539, accessed 12 July 2013]).