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Despite the mechanical flaws of the stepped reckoner, it suggested possibilities to future calculator builders. The operating mechanism, invented by Leibniz, called the stepped cylinder or Leibniz wheel, was used in many calculating machines for 200 years, and into the 1970s with the Curta hand calculator.
A Leibniz wheel or stepped drum is a cylinder with a set of teeth of incremental lengths which, when coupled to a counting wheel, can be used in the calculating engine of a class of mechanical calculators. Invented by Leibniz in 1673, it was used for three centuries until the advent of the electronic calculator in the mid-1970s.
In 1770, Philipp Matthäus Hahn, a German pastor, built two circular calculating machines based on Leibniz' cylinders. [51] [52] J. C. Schuster, Hahn's brother-in-law, built a few machines of Hahn's design into the early 19th century. [53] In 1775, Lord Stanhope of the United Kingdom designed a pinwheel machine. It was set in a rectangular box ...
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 work as the supervisor of taxes in Rouen , France. [ 2 ]
Leibniz constructed just such a machine for mathematical calculations, which was also called a "stepped reckoner". As a computing machine, the ideal calculus ratiocinator would perform Leibniz's integral and differential calculus. In this way the meaning of the word, "ratiocinator" is clarified and can be understood as a mechanical instrument ...
Stepped Reckoner, 1672 – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's mechanical calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Difference Engine, 1822 – Charles Babbage's mechanical device to calculate polynomials. Analytical Engine, 1837 – A later Charles Babbage device that could be said to encapsulate most of the elements of modern computers.
A pinwheel calculator is a class of mechanical calculator described as early as 1685, and popular in the 19th and 20th century, calculating via wheels whose number of teeth were adjustable. These wheels, also called pinwheels, could be set by using a side lever which could expose anywhere from 0 to 9 teeth, and therefore when coupled to a ...
This machine was composed of four modified Triumphator calculators. [31] [32] [33] Leslie Comrie in 1928 described how to use the Brunsviga-Dupla calculating machine as a difference engine of second-order (15-digit numbers). [28] He also noted in 1931 that National Accounting Machine Class 3000 could be used as a difference engine of sixth-order.