Information / Electronics & Computing

Mechanical Calculator

Pascal and Leibniz build gear-driven machines that add, subtract and (Leibniz) multiply: arithmetic without thinking.

Wilhelm Schickard built a calculating clock in 1623; Blaise Pascal built the Pascaline in 1642 to help with his father's tax calculations. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz designed a stepped-drum machine around 1673 that handled all four basic operations, and he described the binary system. The devices stayed expensive and fragile, but they proved that calculation can run mechanically.