“In his middle to late thirties (over the years 1679-85), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent more than three years in his visits to a silver mining region in the Harz mountains. He believed he could devise new and more efficient ways of pumping water out of the deep shafts, enabling miners to dig even deeper and extract more silver from the earth. Had he succeeded, he would have doubled his salary and freed himself from the drudgery of his service to the House of Brunswick…..

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