![]() William Webster published A plaine and most necessarie booke of tables, for simple and compound interest, in 1625. The earliest surviving ready reckoner in English dates from the 1570s other sources attribute the invention to the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin, who calculated and published decimal tables in the 1580s. These could be either general-purpose – aimed to meet the needs of a variety of trades – or designed specifically for one trade or group of trades. Various devices were invented to aid this process, such as the abacus, log tables, slide rule, stepped reckoner, or the comptometer, but the most commonly used device for everyday commerce was the ready reckoner. This was especially so when calculations involved non-decimal currencies. Prior to the 1960s and the widespread introduction of calculators, multiplication was a laborious chore, often prone to error. ![]() ![]() They were widely used in shops and by tradesmen before the advent of cheap electronic calculators, metric weights and measures and decimal currencies in the 1970s. The Ready-Reckoner, or Farmer’s Complete Table Aberystwyth, 19th centuryĪ ready reckoner is a printed book or table containing pre-calculated values, often multiples of given amounts. ![]()
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