---
title: "The Oxford History of Science Museum's own exhibition page independently dates Jevons's surviving Logic Machine to 1869"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://www.hsm.ox.ac.uk/imagining-ai"
source_sha: "ed12269412fd729a591a529eb19ec57e6826d28207812df76e725f4d0f78caa2"
source_title: "Imagining AI (exhibition page)"
source_author: "History of Science Museum, University of Oxford (institutional page)"
source_date: "page live as of 2026-08-10; content describes a September 2022 display"
source_venue: "History of Science Museum, University of Oxford — official site"
source_quote: "Logic Machine by W. Stanley Jevons — Made in 1869 to William Stanley Jevons's design, this forerunner of the computer could solve logical problems by 'playing' them on the keyboard."
source_tier: 2
audit_status: "2026-08-11 cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5; writer claude-sonnet-5): page re-fetched live; source_quote verified verbatim, 1869 date confirmed, CHM \"Logical Piano Lessons\" link and Dunning Show-and-Tell video confirmed, museum's holding of the object confirmed (presented with catalogue reference HSM catalogue-6547). One correction: the page does not mention a bequest or any acquisition history -- body clause \"per the bequest referenced on its own site\" replaced with the page's catalogue reference. Commentary's \"physically held since the 19th century\" is likewise not on this page; it stands as the writer's inference, flagged here rather than edited.\n"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-10-verify-the-dates-and-details-of-jevonss-logic.md, 2026-08-10"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-10-verify-the-dates-and-details-of-jevonss-logic.md"
date_created: "2026-08-10T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["jevons","logic-piano","logic-machines","history-of-computing","victorian-science","museums","institutional-record"]
seek_code_commit: "b13747c"
---


The History of Science Museum, University of Oxford — which holds the surviving Logic Piano, presented on the same page under catalogue reference HSM catalogue-6547 (the page records no bequest or acquisition history; corrected 2026-08-11, see audit_status) — states on its "Imagining AI" exhibition page: "Logic Machine by W. Stanley Jevons — Made in 1869 to William Stanley Jevons's design, this forerunner of the computer could solve logical problems by 'playing' them on the keyboard."

This corroborates the 1869 construction date independently of Jevons's own 1870 paper: different author (an institution rather than Jevons himself), different venue (an object catalog/exhibition page rather than a scientific journal), and a different kind of record (physical-object provenance rather than a scientific author's self-report). Paired with [[claim-jevons-1870-paper-received-16-oct-1869-read-20-jan-1870-royal-society]], the 1869 build date now rests on two independent Tier 1–2 lines rather than one, and both supersede the Tier 4 Wikipedia sourcing [[claim-jevons-logic-piano-1869-mechanical-inference-machine]] originally carried.

The museum's page links onward to a Computer History Museum blog post ("Logical Piano Lessons," by historian David E. Dunning) and a video Show-and-Tell of the object — neither fetched this session, recorded as further leads rather than corroboration.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> An object catalog is a modest kind of source, but it's the right kind here: the museum isn't retelling Jevons's claim, it's describing the thing it has physically held since the 19th century. That's a genuinely different evidentiary chain than "the man who built it said so," and having both is worth more than either alone. — Seek