Who Invented the Computer?

Who Invented the Computer? — page 3 — wanted to make a machine for him that would automate the process In 1623 he built a device that he called a calculating clock This was the ﬁrst mechanical calculator Unfortunately before he could give it to Kepler it was destroyed in a ﬁre The Pascaline The ﬁrst mechanical calculator to be produced and actually used was the arithmetic machine or Pascaline designed by French mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1645 Numbers were entered into the machine by turning a series of dials Pascal designed the machine to help his father a tax collector Pascal built 50 arithmetic machines and managed to sell about a dozen of them In 1671 German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz designed a machine called the step reckoner This was an improvement on Pascal’s idea because by adding numbers repeatedly it could multiply Calculators Living computers During the 16th to 18th centuries more and more of the world was being explored by Europeans The resulting trade boom was known as the Commercial Revolution The increase in travel and trade meant that faster ways of making calculations were needed The word computer was ﬁrst used around the same time as Napier was discovering logarithms These computers weren’t machines they were people who made calculations or computations These could include calculating the positions of stars and planets for use in ships navigation charts Humans doing calculations all day may get bored tired and make mistakes So inventors looked for ways of making the task of computing faster and more reliable The search for a practical mechanical computer was on The calculating clock In 1617 the year Napier died German churchman Wilhelm Schickard met the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the two men became friends Kepler was using Napier’s logarithms as he studied the stars and planets but Schickard Although the original calculating clock was destroyed Schickard left a detailed enough description of it for this replica to be built It is in the Deutsches Museum in Munich Germany 8

Who Invented the Computer? — page 4 — Blaise Pascal Date of birth June 19 1623 Place of birth Clermont France Profession Mathematician and philosopher Greatest achievement Pascal is best known for developing a mathematical theory called the theory of probability Interesting fact Pascal set out an argument for believing in God called Pascal’s wager He said that if God does not exist one will lose nothing by believing in him But if God does exist one will lose everything by not believing Date of death August 19 1662 The binary system As well as making his step reckoner Leibniz was also interested in the binary number system and how it could be used In everyday life we use the decimal system of counting The decimal or base 10 system uses the numbers 1 to 9 and 0 Numbers are ordered in multiples of ten units in one column tens in the next hundreds in the next and so on The binary system uses just two symbols 0 and 1 So 1 is written as 1 but 2 is written as 10 meaning one 2 and no 1s Three is 11 one 2 and one 1 0 0 1 1 2 10 3 11 4 100 5 101 6 110 7 111 8 1000 9 1001 10 1010 Four is two 2s which is 100 just as 10 tens are 100 in the decimal system Five is 101 two 2s and one 1 and so on Today binary is the cornerstone of computer programming where every number can be represented by a series of switches that are either on 1 or off 0 Breakthrough Mechanical calculators were invented making calculations easier and more likely to be accurate This was important both in science and trade This table shows the numbers 1 to 10 in the decimal system we use every day and how they are written in the binary system 9

Who Invented the Computer? — page 5 — A revolution Industry arrives The Commercial Revolution was followed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by the Industrial Revolution one of the most important periods in human history It began in Britain around 1730 and it was a time when there was a shift from a largely rural economy where everything was made by hand to one with large cities and factories producing goods in huge quantities The Jacquard loom Textile manufacture was one of the principal industries of the Industrial Revolution and this was one of the ﬁrst things to be mechanized In 1804 Frenchman Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a textile-weaving loom It was one of the most ingenious devices of its time and introduced a technology that was still in use 150 years later including in early computers punched cards Punched cards Like other looms the Jacquard had a series of threads running lengthways the warp threads and a shuttle that carried another thread back and forth the weft thread weaving in and out of these to make the cloth Patterns were created by raising and lowering individual warp threads so that the weft was sometimes in front of the warp thread and sometimes behind it The Industrial Revolution brought a massive increase in manufacturing and trade There was an urgent need for fast easy to use accurate calculating machines to keep track of the goods being produced and the money changing hands Jacquard’s loom used hooks to raise and lower the warp threads These were controlled by a series of cards with rows of holes punched in them Where a hook met

Who Invented the Computer? — page 6 — a hole in a card it could pass through and raise the thread Where there was no hole the hook was stopped and the thread stayed down One row of holes on the card corresponded to a single pass of the shuttle across the warp threads A whole deck of these punched cards could be inserted into a device that automatically dropped cards into place one at a time making it possible to weave very complicated patterns In effect the cards programmed the loom to weave patterns automatically It was the ﬁrst machine ever to be operated in this way The arithmometer With the changes in manufacturing brought about by mechanization and the boom in national and international trade that followed the need for better faster and more reliable calculating devices grew ever stronger This was because merchants had to keep track of so many goods and materials and so much money was changing hands Frenchman Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar invented the ﬁrst commercial calculator in 1820 The arithmometer as it was called used a system of sliders to A Jacquard loom in use in Poland Punched cards carry the instructions that control the way the cloth is woven Patterns are automatically produced using the different colored threads input the numbers and dials to show the answers It could reliably add subtract and multiply and with a bit of effort from the user it could divide too Production began in 1851 and continued with improvements until 1914 when the company went out of business Breakthroughs Inventors had found ways to program machines to carry out complicated tasks without humans being present Calculating machines became widely available commercially and made the task of buying and selling on a vast scale much easier 11

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