Letter 3690

Machin forwards a draft of a letter he is going to send to an engineer in France. It is based on what was discussed at the previous meeting. Machin ‘read over his [the engineer’s] book more carefully’ and determined the man is ‘slightly skilled in astronomy’. The man wants his discovery, an invention of some sort, sent to England for examination by the Royal Society and given to the King of Great Britain. Machin thinks this to be a pompous request. John Machin (bap. 1686?, d. 1751) was an astronomer. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1710 and served as its Secretary between 1718 and 1747. Machin was on the Royal Society committee that mediated Newton and Leibnitz’s dispute over the invention of calculus. Some of his mathematical work was published in the Philosophical Transactions (Anita McConnell, ‘Machin, John (bap. 1686?, d. 1751)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17533, accessed 19 Aug 2014]).