You must have heard about “A Man Who Was A Hospital”, but have you heard about the man who was a calculator?
This is a true story of a slave from Africa who amazed the world with his incredible Maths skills. đ
Thomas Fuller, an African who was sold into slavery in 1724 at the age of 14, and who became known as the âVirginia Calculatorâ for his extraordinary ability to solve complex math problems in his head. đ§
You wonât believe what he did when he was tested by some members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1780. đ˛
They asked him how many seconds are in one and a half years, and he gave them the answer of 47,304,000 in about two minutes. Then they asked him how many seconds a person who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old has lived, and he gave them the answer of 2,210,500,800 in about a minute and a half.
One of them was checking the answers on paper, and he told Fuller that he was wrong, because the answers were too big. Fuller quickly said, â’Stop, master, you forget the leap year.â When they added the leap year, the answers matched.
Isn’t that incredible? For more posts like these, keep visiting our blog.
Source: Rush, B. (1788). An account of the life and character of an African, who was sold by his master in Africa, and afterwards became a slave in Pennsylvania. The American Museum, or Universal Magazine, 3(1), 33-36.
