Samuel Morland

Sir Samuel Morland, 1st Baronet, who lived from 1625 to 1695, was an English academic, diplomat, spy, inventor and mathematician, a polymath credited with early developments in computing, hydraulics and steam power. Educated at Winchester College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, he became a Fellow in 1649, and in 1655 Oliver Cromwell sent him on a mission to Italy to protest against actions taken against the Waldensians. Serving as secretary to John Thurloe, he became a double agent working towards the Restoration, and in the 1660s he may have invented columnar transposition. Created a baronet in 1660, he earned his living by applying mathematics and hydraulics to build water engines, patenting around 1675 a plunger pump, and his calculation of the volume of steam at about two thousand times that of water was not improved on for a century. His machines included a non-decimal adding machine and an arithmetical machine regarded by some as the first multiplying machine, and in 1671 he claimed credit for inventing the speaking trumpet.