page_title: Organum Mathematicum
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Organum Mathematicum / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration of musical rods used in the Athanaius Kircher's Organum Mathematicum, illustrated in "Organum Mathematicum" by Gaspar Schott, 1668. Very similar rods were originally used in Kircher's Arca Musarithmica.
context_page_description: The Organum Mathematicum was an information device or teaching machine that was invented by the Jesuit polymath and scholar Athanasius Kircher in the middle of the 17th century. The device was intended to aid in mathematical and other calculations, much as we now use digital computers and calculators. With proper instruction and use, the device was capable of assisting in a wide assortment of calculations, including arithmetic, cryptography, and music.
  Kircher adopted some of the ideas in the Organum from preexisting inventions like Napier's bones, almanacs, and his own Arca Musarithmica. Like other calculating devices of the period, the Organum prefigures modern computing technology. Yet, due to its general lack of adoption, it remains an interesting but obscure footnote in the history of information technology.
context_section_description: In 1661, 11 years after the publication of Musurgia Universalis, which contains a description of a similar, but more limited device, the Arca Musarithmica, Kircher sent an Organum Mathematicum to Gottfried Aloys Kinner, the tutor to the 12-year-old Charles Joseph, Archduke of Habsburg, for whom the Organum was likely intended.  Kircher enclosed instructions in a drawer in the base of the device, as well as a set of mathematical instruments.
  The Organum Mathematicum was later described in a 1668 book of the same title by Gaspar Schott, who was Kircher's pupil.  The book includes numerous excerpts from the original manual.  There is also a portrait of the young Charles Joseph who had died four years earlier.  There are no surviving Organums which closely resemble the device illustrated in Schott's book, but there are three known devices, likely of Jesuit manufacture, which contain essentially the same content.
caption: Front and back of one of Kircher's musical rods
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