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  • 11 - What ‘Consul, the Educated Monkey’ Can Teach Us about Early-Twentieth-Century Mathematics, Learning, and Vaudeville

  • Edited by Joshua Nall, University of Cambridge, Liba Taub, University of Cambridge, Frances Willmoth, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Whipple Museum of the History of Science
    Published online:
    19 August 2019
    Print publication:
    22 August 2019, pp 237-256
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  • Summary

    This chapter explores one of the Whipple Museum’s most popular cheap scientific ‘toys’, ‘Consul the Educated Monkey’. It investigates the tacit and explicit meanings of an object in the Whipple’s collection that is at once a mechanical calculator and a depiction of a monkey. This unusual amalgamation offers us a window into the world that made and used it, including how people thought about mathematics, education, and childhood in the early twentieth century. Consul’s invention coincides with the rise of public education and Progressivism in the United States, and this science toy embodies such cultural trends by providing fun ways to learn arithmetic and by bringing mathematics into the home as well as school. I suggest that Consul bridged the boundaries between school and home, work and play, and adulthood and childhood, making the red-suited calculating monkey a valuable informant about early twentieth-century American culture.