London Bridge (pp 260–278)

In 1673, Daniel Waterhouse meets the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on London Bridge to discuss a mechanical calculating machine and the state of natural philosophy.

“the sluice between the starlings—the snowshoe-like platforms of rubble that served as footings for the piers” — Starlings were massive, boat-shaped wooden frames filled with stone built around the bridge piers for protection. They restricted water flow so severely that the river “shot” through the gaps like a cataract, making navigation extremely dangerous.

“questions, in several languages, about the war.” — The Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674) was part of a series of naval conflicts between England and the Dutch Republic over control of global trade routes.

“If these had information, they would take it to the ’Change” — The Royal Exchange was the center of commerce in London where merchants and brokers traded goods; news of naval victories or defeats caused immediate market fluctuations.

“Any news, or rumor, of cannons bursting on English ships?” — Early modern naval artillery was prone to “bursting” due to metallurgical flaws or poor casting, often killing the crew and destroying the ship’s hull from the inside.

“building on ideas from Wilkins’s Cryptonomicon” — While Cryptonomicon is the title of a later Stephenson novel, the real John Wilkins wrote Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641), a foundational work on cryptography and linguistics.

“jumbled avalanche of blackened rubble left over from the Fire” — The Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed most of the City, necessitating a massive rebuilding effort led by figures like Hooke and Wren.

“nephew of the Archbishop of Mainz, the other the son of Baron von Boineburg” — These were Leibniz’s real-life patrons, Boineburg and Mainz, who involved him in high-level diplomacy to prevent French expansion into German territories.

“Oldenburg, the Parisians who frequented the Salon at the Hotel Montmor” — Henry Oldenburg was the secretary of the Royal Society, while the Montmor Academy was a private scientific circle in Paris that preceded the French Academy of Sciences.

“men who’d personally known Descartes and Fermat” — Descartes and Fermat were two of the most influential mathematicians and philosophers of the 17th century whose work set the stage for the Enlightenment.

“Bishop has had to move… he’s at his stepdaughter’s house in Chancery Lane” — John Wilkins died in 1672 at the home of his stepdaughter’s husband, John Tillotson. Stephenson’s annotation: “It might be worth noting that, though this chapter is set in 1673, John Wilkins died in 1672… a reminder that this is not historical fact.”

“racket of the water-wheels, confined and focused in the stone vault of the gatehouse” — The London Bridge Waterworks was a system of massive water wheels installed under the arches of the bridge to pump water to the city’s residents.

“Swedes took Prague that year, and invaded Bavaria” — This refers to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), a devastating conflict that Leibniz and his contemporaries were born into or lived in the immediate aftermath of.

“truth can be grasped as if pictured on paper” — From the original wiki (Gary Thompson): “Leibniz called this symbolic manipulation of statements the calculus ratiocinator. The calculus would only produce true statements. You could sit at your desk and churn out fact after fact of science, philosophy, or politics. He got as far as the principles of noncontradiction and indiscernability (two things that have the same properties are the same).

In 1930, Gödel showed the impossibility of this working for even a subset of knowledge, mathematics.”

**“They are

Original annotations by: pronoiac, trismegis2, thompson