page_title: Mechanical calculator
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Mechanical calculator / The 17th century / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: Reduced size of picture by eliminating surrounding. Rotated picture 4 degrees.
context_page_description: A mechanical calculator, or calculating machine, is a mechanical device used to perform the basic operations of arithmetic automatically. Most mechanical calculators were comparable in size to small desktop computers and have been rendered obsolete by the advent of the electronic calculator.
  Surviving notes from Wilhelm Schickard in 1623 reveal that he designed and had built the earliest of the modern attempts at mechanizing calculation. His machine was composed of two sets of technologies: first an abacus made of Napier's bones, to simplify multiplications and divisions first described six years earlier in 1617, and for the mechanical part, it had a dialed pedometer to perform additions and subtractions. A study of the surviving notes shows a machine that would have jammed after a few entries on the same dial, and that it could be damaged if a carry had to be propagated over a few digits. Schickard abandoned his project in 1624 and never mentioned it again until his death 11 years later in 1635.
  Two decades after Schickard's supposedly failed attempt, in 1642, Blaise Pascal decisively solved these particular problems with his invention of the mechanical calculator.
context_section_description: The 17th century marked the beginning of the history of mechanical calculators, as it saw the invention of its first machines, including Pascal's calculator, in 1642. Blaise Pascal had invented a machine which he presented as being able to perform computations that were previously thought to be only humanly possible.
  In a sense, Pascal's invention was premature, in that the mechanical arts in his time were not sufficiently advanced to enable his machine to be made at an economic price, with the accuracy and strength needed for reasonably long use. This difficulty was not overcome until well on into the nineteenth century, by which time also a renewed stimulus to invention was given by the need for many kinds of calculation more intricate than those considered by Pascal.
  — S. Chapman, Pascal tercentenary celebration, London, (1942)
  The 17th century also saw the invention of some very powerful tools to aid arithmetic calculations like Napier's bones, logarithmic tables and the slide rule which, for their ease of use by scientists in multiplying and dividing, ruled over and impeded the use and development of mechanical calculators until the production release of the arithmometer in the mid 19th century.
caption: Four of Pascal's calculators and one machine built by Lépine in 1725,[18] Musée des Arts et Métiers
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