George Boole… never had the thrill of seeing a Boolean expression realized in switches, wires, and lightbulbs. One obstacle, of course, was that the incandescent lightbulb wasn’t invented until 15 years after Boole’s death. But Samuel Morse had demonstrated his telegraph in 1844 – ten years before the publication of Boole’s The Laws of Thought– and it would be simple to substitute a telegraph sounder for the lightbulb.

But nobody in the nineteenth century made the connection between the ANDs and Ors of Boolean algebra and the wiring of simple switches in series and in parallel. No mathematician, no electrician, no telegraph operator, nobody. Not even that icon of the computer revolution Charles Babbage, who had corresponded with Boole and knew his work, and who struggled for much of his life designing first a Difference Engine and then an Analytical Engine that a century later would be regarded as the precursors to modern computers.