be the first calculator sold by a distributor. Pascal feared that craftsmen would not be able to accurately reproduce his Pascaline, which would result in false copies that would ruin his reputation along with the reputation of his machine. In 1645, in order to control the production of his invention, Pascal wrote to Monseigneur Le Chancelier (the chancellor of France, Pierre Séguier) in his letter entitled "La Machine d’arithmétique. Lettre dédicatoire à Monseigneur le Chancelier". Pascal requested that no Pascaline be made without his permission. His ingenuity garnered the respect of King Louis XIV of France who granted his request, but it came at a price; craftsmen were not able to legally experiment with Pascal's design, nor were they able to distribute his machine without his permission/guidance. Social Context of Intellectual Collaboration with Craftsmen Pascal lived in France during France's Ancien Régime. During his time, craftsmen in Europe increasingly organised into guilds, such as the English clockmakers who formed the Clockmakers guild in 1631, half-way through Pascal's efforts to create the calculator. This affected Pascal’s ability to recruit talent as guilds often reduced the exchange of ideas and trade; sometimes, craftsmen would withhold their labour altogether to rebel against the nobles. Thus Pascal was in a market that had a scarcity of skills and willing workers. Importantly, artisans were not free as intellectuals to create the machine: Gottfried Leibniz, who built upon Pascal's calculator later in the 17th century, had the progress for his machine halted due to his artisan selling the machine's parts for financial solvency. Pascal’s own conduct led to difficulty in recruiting artisans for his project. This was rooted by his belief that matters of the mind trumped those of the body. Pascal was not alone, as many natural philosophers of his time had a hylomorphic understanding of the inventing process: ideas precede materialisation, as form precedes matter. This naturally led to an emphasis on theoretical purity and an underappreciation for practical work. As Pascal described artisans: “[they] work through groping trial and error, that is, without certain measures and proportions regulated by art, produc[ing] nothing corresponding to what they had sought, or, what’s more, they make a little monster appear, that lacks its principal limbs, the others being deformed, lacking any proportion.” Pascal operated his project with this hierarchy in mind: he invented and thought, while the artisans simply executed. He hid the theory from artisans,