In a blink of the eye in planetary timescales, we’ve gone from chasing things with pointy sticks to landing humans on the moon and every invention started out with someone saying 'It sure would be neat if that thing existed' and then going and inventing it and my invention didn't keep us safer, more comfortable or any healthier but it made cheating at math's a breeze.
While the Pilgrims were landing at Plymouth Rock and Europe was dealing with various plagues, i ignored the struggles of everyday life to use projective geometry to figure out how air pressure and vacuums work and it was while hearing my accountant father complain about how working out the pages and pages of figures gave him a banging headache that i thought i would help by putting my big brain to help him with a mathematics machine.
Using a box with dials that could be twisted, i came up with a machine that he could use to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and display the result.
I built 50 of them for him to hand out to his accountant friends and i called it the Pascaline but it never really took off and instead went off to ponder on what became known as Pascal's wager which states that a rational person should live as though God exists because if he does then they stand to receive infinite gains in Heaven against if he doesn't.
On less theological matters, one my last designs was creating a route for a carriage with many seats for Paris that would move passengers around a fixed route for a fixed price but my bus idea was 200 years too early as was a cure for my tuberculosis and i finally got an answer to my wager aged only 39 but no spoilers here, you will have to wait and see for yourself.
My legacy then would be the number 18 to Sudbury & Harrow Road and the schoolkids sat on it writing 58008 and 55378008 into their Pascaline's and turning it upside down.
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