How does the pascaline calculator work

Aracelys Malottki Professional. Who made a calculator? Blaise Pascal. Hester Habermalz Professional. Who is the first calculating device? Focus On.

There is a long history detailing the invention of computing and calculating machines. The earliest recorded calculating device is the abacus. Used as a simple computing device for performing arithmetic, the abacus most likely appeared first in Babylonia now Iraq over years ago.

Eliany Burdorf Professional. How the calculator was invented? Blaise Pascal and the rise of the true mechanical calculator. Filomena Beckmann Explainer. Who invented zero? Lani Janices Explainer. How Blaise Pascal invented the calculator? Marite Goirigolzarri Explainer. First Gottfried Leibniz invented his Leibniz wheels after while trying to add an automatic multiplication feature to the pascaline, [ 10 ] then in , Thomas de Colmar drew his inspiration from Pascal and Leibniz when he designed his arithmometer , the first mechanical calculator strong enough and reliable enough to be used daily in an office environment, and finally in , Dorr E.

Felt substituted the input wheels of the pascaline by columns of keys to invent his comptometer, the first calculator operated by keys and the first calculator to receive an all-electronic calculating engine in The abacus , probably invented in Sumer between and BC, is the first computing machine invented by humans, but has no automatically moving parts or gears and only provides an aid to calculation.

After the development of the abacus, no significant advances were made until John Napier devised his numbering rods, or Napier's Bones, in Various forms of the Bones appeared, some greatly simplified computations but still needed human intelligence to operate. A short list of other precursors to the mechanical calculator must include the Greek Antikythera mechanism from around BC, an out of place, unique, geared mechanism followed more than a millennium later by early mechanical clocks and geared astrolabes ; These machines were all made of toothed gears linked by some sort of carry mechanisms.

They belong to a group of mechanical analog computers which, once set, are only modified by the continuous and repeated action of their actuators crank handle, weight, wheel Some measuring instruments and automatons were also precursors to the calculating machine.

An odometer, instrument for measuring distances, was first described around 25 BC by the roman engineer Vitruvius in the tenth volume of his De architectura.

It was made of a set of toothed gears linked by a carry mechanism ; the first one was driven by one of the chariot wheels and the last one dropped a small pebble in a bag for each Roman mile traveled. A Chinese text of the third century AD described a chariot equipped with a geared mechanism that operated two wooden figures. One would strike a drum for every Chinese Li traveled, the other one would strike a gong for every ten Li traveled. Around the end of the tenth century, the French monk Gerbert d'Aurillac , whose abacus taught the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to the Europeans, [ 14 ] brought back from Spain the drawings of a brazen head, invented by the Moors , which answered Yes or No to the questions it was asked binary arithmetic.

Again in the thirteenth century, the monks Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon built mechanical speaking heads made of earthware without any further development Albertus Magnus complained that he had wasted forty years of his life when Thomas Aquinas , terrified by this speaking machine, destroyed it [ 16 ]. The Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci drew an odometer before In , the French craftsman Jean Fernel built the first pedometer.

It was made in the shape of a watch and had 4 dials units, tens, hundreds, thousands linked by a single tooth carry mechanism. In and , Wilhelm Schickard drew a calculating clock on two letters that he sent to Kepler. Pascal began to work on his calculator in , when he was only 19 years old.

He had been assisting his father, who worked as a tax commissioner, and sought to produce a device which could reduce some of his workload. Pascal received a Royal Privilege in that granted him exclusive rights to make and sell calculating machines in France.

By Pascal had sold about twenty machines, but the cost and complexity of the Pascaline was a barrier to further sales, and production ceased in that year. Gottfried Leibniz started to work on his own calculator after Pascal's death. He first tried to build a machine that could multiply automatically while sitting on top of the Pascaline, assuming wrongly that all the dials on Pascal's calculator could be operated at the same time.

Even though it couldn't be done, this was the first time that a pinwheel was described and used in the drawings of a calculator. He then devised a competing design, the Stepped Reckoner which was meant to perform additions, subtractions and multiplications automatically and division under operator control; Leibniz struggled for forty years to perfect this design and produced two machines, one in and one in The German calculating-machine inventor Arthur Burkhardt was asked to put this machine in operating condition if possible.

His report was favorable except for the sequence in the carry. He was also the first to have cursors to inscribe the first operand and a movable carriage for results. Claude Perrault designed an "Abaque Rhabdologique" around which is often mistaken for a mechanical calculator because it has a carry mechanism in between the numbers. But it is an abacus, because it requires the operator to handle the machine differently when a carry transfer takes place.

This makes Pascal's calculator the only working mechanical calculator in the 17th century. Calculating machines did not become commercially viable until , when Thomas de Colmar released, after thirty years of development, his simplified Arithmometer , the first machine strong enough to be used daily in an office environment.

The Arithmometer was designed around Leibniz wheels and initially used Pascal's 9's complement method for subtractions. Pascal tercentenary celebration of his invention of the mechanical calculator happened during WWII when France was occupied by Germany and therefore the main celebration was held in London, England.

Some of the speeches given best describe his achievement:. Pascalines came in both decimal and non-decimal varieties, both of which exist in museums today. They were designed to be used by scientists, accountants and surveyors.

The simplest Pascaline had five dials ; later production variants had up to ten dials. The contemporary French currency system used livres , sols and deniers with 20 sols to a livre and 12 deniers to a sol.

Length was measured in toises , pieds , pouces and lignes with 6 pieds to a toise , 12 pouces to a pied and 12 lignes to a pouce. Therefore the pascaline needed wheels in base 6, 10, 12 and Non decimal wheels were always located before the decimal part.

In an accounting machine.. In a surveyor's machine.. Scientific machines just had decimal wheels. The metric system was adopted in France on December 10, by which time Pascal's basic design had inspired other craftsmen, although with a similar lack of commercial success. Most of the machines that have survived the centuries are of the accounting type. Seven of them are in European museums, one belongs to the IBM corporation and one is in private hands. The calculator had spoked metal wheel dials, with the digit 0 through 9 displayed around the circumference of each wheel.

To input a digit, the user placed a stylus in the corresponding space between the spokes, and turned the dial until a metal stop at the bottom was reached, similar to the way a rotary telephone dial is used.

This would display the number in the display windows at the top of the calculator. Then, one would simply redial the second number to be added, causing the sum of both numbers to appear in the accumulator. Each dial is associated with a one-digit display window located directly above it. It displays the value of the accumulator for this position.

The complement of this digit, in the base of the wheel 6, 10, 12, 20 , is displayed just above this digit. A horizontal bar hides either all the complement numbers when it is slid to the top or all the direct numbers when it is slid toward the center of the machine and thereby displays either the content of the accumulator or the complement of its value.

Since the gears of the calculator rotated in only one direction, negative numbers could not be directly summed. To subtract one number from another, the method of nine's complement was used. The only two differences between an addition and a subtraction are the position of the display bar direct versus complement and the way the first number is entered direct versus complement. For a digit wheel N , the fixed outside wheel is numbered from 0 to 9 N The numbers are inscribed in a decreasing manner clockwise going from the bottom left to the bottom right of the stop lever.

To add a 5, one must insert a stylus between the spokes that surround the number 5 and rotate the wheel clockwise all the way to the stop lever. The number displayed on the corresponding display register will be increased by 5 and, if a carry transfer takes place, the display register to the left of it will be increased by 1.

I was looking for an interesting but expensive gadget for Harriet to own, and was really surprised to discover that the first calculator was invented as long ago as the 17 th century! Having hopefully now excused myself to any German readers, the Pascaline was certainly manufactured and used by a number of people. A number of copies survive today.

Anyone old enough to remember pre-decimal currency in Britain will shudder at the memory of having to add sums of pounds, shillings and pence, as there were 12 pennies in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound. In , at the age of nineteen, Blaise started to design a machine that would help with the calculations and a year later had completed his first version of it.

Several copies were made, but he was not fully satisfied with it, as the mechanism was too fragile, so if the machine was jolted, or transported anywhere, it would often no longer work. Pascal became interested in geometry at age 12, and taught himself quickly about the properties of figures. By age 14, Pascal was meeting weekly with prominent French mathematicians — the group that would form the foundation for the French Academy — and by age 16 he was developing theories, beginning with his essay on conic sections.

This work was published in He was the second person known to have created a device of this kind. A company by the name of Schickard had manufactured a type of mechanical calculator in Until , Pascal worked on improvements to the machine, which was called the Pascaline.

It resembled the mechanical calculators of the s.