Pascal's calculator, also called the Pascaline, was a mechanical calculator invented by the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal when he was still a teenager. He designed it to help his father, a tax official in Rouen, who spent long hours on tedious arithmetic. The machine used a series of interlocked gears and wheels that could add and subtract numbers directly, with a mechanism for carrying digits from one wheel to the next. Multiplication and division were possible by repeated operations. Pascal built a number of versions, and some survive in museums, but they were expensive and delicate and did not sell widely. The device is seen as an important early step in the history of computing.
Before and after
- from 1 December 1640 to 13 February 1668Portuguese Restoration War
- 1642The Night Watch
- from 1642 to 1646First English Civil War
- from 1642 to 1651English Civil War
- 1642Invention of Pascal's calculator
- 8 January 1642Death of Galileo Galilei
- 25 December 1642Birth of Isaac Newton
- 1643Barometer
- from 23 February 1643 to 30 August 1645Kieft's War
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The era
This moment belongs to the Early modern world (1500 CE to 1760 CE), voyages, printing and new ideas. You can also browse everything in the 17th century.