| Pascaline | |
| One of the earliest mechanical
devices for calculating was the Pascaline, invented by the French philosopher
and mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1642. He was employed in the recording
of taxes for the French government, a tedious job that often kept him up
until the early hours of the morning. He thought that the task of adding
numbers should be able to be done by a mechanism that would resemble the
way a clock keeps time. So he invented a complicated set of gears which
could only be used to perform addition and not at all for multiplication
or division. Pascaline never got the device to work properly.
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| About Blaise Pascal |