C:\Games\DarkAges\Calc_Machines
The first mechanical calculator
For a long time, Blaise Pascal was believed to be the inventor of the first mechanical calculating machine with gears in 1640. He built the adding machine for his father, who was a tax official. This adding machine is known as the Pascaline. For subtraction, you had to work with complementary numbers because you couldn’t turn the dials backwards.
It was not until much later, in 1955, that records were found in which the professor Wilhelm Schickard described a calculating clock in a letter to his friend Kepler in 1632. Schickard was an astronomer, geodesist and mathematician and taught astronomy and Hebrew in Tübingen. Since he was mechanically very talented, he built most of his instruments himself. His machine could add and subtract, and when the values overflowed, a bell rang. For more complex calculations such as multiplications and divisions, Napier’s slide rules had to be used.
It is said that he kept one of these machines himself and sent another to his friend Johannes Kepler, the famous astronomer. None of the specimens is preserved today; however, the machine was reconstructed in 1960 by Bruno von Freytag-Löringhoff, a professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen.
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Table of contents
| Yr | Name | Link |
|---|---|---|
| — | Introduction |  |
| 1623 | Schickard calculating machine | |
| 1642 | Pascaline |  |
| 1671 | Four-Species Relay Roll |  |
| 1805 | Jacquard weaving loom |  |
| 1837 | Difference engine |  |
| 1843 | Analytical Engine |  |
| 1890 | Hollerithmachine |  |
| 1936 | Turing machine |  |