Pascal's calculator

The Pascaline is a mechanical calculating machine, which was invented in 1642 by Blaise Pascal. It was long considered a first mechanical calculating machine at all until documents were found in the 20th century, who demonstrated that the construction of a calculating machine by Wilhelm Schickard in the 1620s.

First called Pascal's invention in French machine d' arithmétique, then roue pascaline ( " pascal cal wheel" ), and finally pascaline.

Pascal started working on his adding machine, when he was 19 years old, and they constructed to facilitate working for his father, who was a tax official. It was made ​​, inter alia, brass, ivory and wood. During his life, Pascal refined the mechanism repeatedly and so made ​​about 50 versions of the Pascaline to.

The Pascaline had Metallwählscheiben where the desired numbers could be adjusted. The results appeared in the box on the dials. The prototype had only a few dials, later versions had a larger number and could count numbers up to 9,999,999. Direct subtraction was not possible with the Pascaline; it had the complementary method to be used ( see also two's for the analogue in the binary system ).

A Pascaline from the period around 1650 is in the Mathematics and Physics Salon of the State Art Collections in Dresden Zwinger. It is the only copy in a public collection outside France.