George Boole took up Leibniz's idea, and wrote a book he called The Laws of Thought. The laws he formulated are now called Boolean algebra... Boole seems to have had a grandiose vision about the applicability of his algebraic methods to practical problems—his book makes it clear that he hoped these laws would be used to settle practical questions. William Stanley Jevons heard of Boole's work, and undertook to build a machine to make calculations in Boolean algebra. He successfully designed and built... the Logical Piano... the first machine to do mechanical inference.

p. 5-6 - "The Mechanization of Mathematics," 2004