Gaspard de Prony

Baron Gaspard Clair François Marie Riche de Prony (1755 to 1839) was a French mathematician and engineer who worked on hydraulics and was Engineer in Chief of the École nationale des ponts et chaussées. In 1791 he began producing logarithmic and trigonometric tables for the French Cadastre, calculating logarithms from 1 to 200,000 to between fourteen and twenty nine decimal places. Inspired by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, he divided the labour into three levels, from a handful of high ranking mathematicians who chose the formulas, through planners, down to a large group of human computers, and boasted that he could manufacture logarithms as easily as one manufactures pins. His source says Charles Babbage was indirectly aided by this division of labour. He became a member and eventually president of the French Academy of Sciences.