Thomas Fowler (inventor)

Thomas Fowler (1777 – 31 March 1843)[1] was an English inventor whose most notable invention was the thermosiphon which formed the basis of early hot water central heating systems.

A system based on his design was installed at Bicton, part of the Rolle Estate and received great acclaim in the Gardener's Magazine of 1829.

This machine was designed to give mechanical form to the techniques described in his book, Tables for Facilitating Arithmetical Calculations.

[9] Apprehensive in case his ideas should again be stolen, he designed and built the machine single-handed from wood in the workshop attached to his printing business.

The use of balanced ternary meant that the machine was not suitable for performing addition and subtraction because of the overhead of the conversion to and from base 10.

It was more useful for problems (like those Thomas Fowler needed to solve as Treasurer of the Poor Law union) where there are a large number of intermediate calculations in between the conversions to and from ternary.

[10] Though the machine did not survive to the present day, a replica has been constructed from a two-page description of it made in the 1840s by the prominent mathematician Augustus DeMorgan.

Starting in 1999 a team of Mark Glusker, Pamela Vass and David Hogan created a concept model of the most simple machine that satisfies the description written by Augustus DeMorgan.