Jevons and the Logic Piano

William Stanley Jevons was born in Liverpool, in England. He studied chemistry in London, and then traveled to New South Wales at the age of 19 to work as an assayer at the Sydney Mint. The Gold Rush was transforming the colony, and his job was to assess the quality and purity of the precious metal pouring into Sydney from the diggings further west. This work put him in a unique position, at the intersection of geology, chemistry, economics and industry. Wanting to document as many aspects of life in Australia as he could, Jevons also took up photography, producing a comprehensive photographic record of the physical and urban landscape of Sydney. He even took his camera equipment to the goldfields. After five years in Australia Jevons returned to England to continue his formal education and eventually obtained a position teaching economics—a subject he’d studied in detail whilst in Sydney—at Owens College in Manchester. Later he became Professor of Economics at University College, London.