maszyny: Wilhelm Schickard

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Wilhelm Schickard (22 April 1592 – 24 October 1635) was a German professor of Hebrew and astronomy who became famous in the second part of the 20th century after Franz Hammer, a biographer (along with Max Caspar) of Johannes Kepler, claimed that the drawings of a calculating clock, predating the public release of Pascal's calculator by twenty years, had been discovered in two unknown letters written by Schickard to Johannes Kepler in 1623 and 1624. Hammer asserted that because these letters had been lost for three hundred years, Blaise Pascal had been called and celebrated as the inventor of the mechanical calculator in error during all this time. After careful examination it was found that…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

A mechanical calculator, or calculating machine, is a mechanical device used to perform the basic operations of arithmetic automatically, or a simulation like an analog computer or a slide rule. Most mechanical calculators were comparable in size to small desktop computers and have been rendered obsolete by the advent of the electronic calculator and the digital computer. In 1642, Blaise Pascal invented the first operational mechanical calculator with better tens-carry. Concerned about his father's exhausting work as tax collector in Rouen, Pascal designed the Pascaline to help with the large amount of tedious arithmetic required. In 1672, Gottfried Leibniz started designing an entirely new…

Evidence: 22 • authority: 88

Polymath Prof. Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635): Inventor of the mechanical calculating machine and the world’s first academic UFO-witness and investigator. Dear Editor, with this letter I would like to point out the early results of my research into the so far little known UFO/UAP-sighting of one of the most famous German polymaths, contemporary and befriended astronomy-colleague of Johannes Kepler, Wilhelm Schickard (1592–1635). This sighting was so far undescribed even in most of UFO research literature. Not only holds the sighting itself many fascinating parallels to modern days UFO encounters; almost 400 years old, the account most likely represents the world’s first and earliest form of…

Evidence: 22 • authority: 72

The Pascaline (also known as the arithmetic machine or Pascal's calculator) is a mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal in 1642. Pascal was led to develop a calculator by the laborious arithmetical calculations required by his father's (Étienne Pascal) work as the supervisor of taxes in Rouen, France. He designed the machine to add and subtract two numbers and to perform multiplication and division through repeated addition or subtraction. It used a stylus to perform calculations. There were three versions of his calculator: one for accounting, one for surveying, and one for science. The accounting version represented the livre which was the currency in France at the time. The next…