2-969-924 - /Heritage Images

Mr. George P. Bidder, C.E. - from a daguerreotype by Mayall, 1856. Civil engineer. 'Mr. Bidder is convinced that Mental Calculation can be taught to children, and be acquired with greater facility and less irksomeness than ordinary arithmetic...it has been generally thought that Mr. Bidder himself has been indebted to unusual powers of memory and a natural mathematical turn of mind for the celebrity he has acquired. Now, Mr. Bidder emphatically declares this not to have been the case; he has sought every opportunity of comparing himself with boys and men who possessed this faculty, and, except so far as being carefully trained and practised in the cultivation and use of figures, he has not found that his memory was more than ordinarily retentive. In fact, whilst at school and at college, he had some difficulty in maintaining a decently respectable position in the mathematical class'. From "Illustrated London News", 1856.