Mechanical Devices
One of the earliest mechanical devices for calculating was the Pascaline, invented by the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1642. The Pascaline was a complicated set of gears similar to a clock, and had the capability to add and subtract numbers. Later in the 17th century Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a famous mathematician, invented a device that could multiply, divide, calculate square roots, as well as addition and subtraction. He called it the Stepped Reckoner. In 1822, Charles Babbage began to work on the Difference Engine. This device would calculate numbers to the 20th place and then print then 44 digits per minute. The original purpose of this machine was to produce tables of numbers that would be used by ships’ navigators. Although never built, the design for the Difference Engine lead to the design of Babbage’s Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine, designed around 1833, was to perform a variety of calculations by the following set of instructions, or program, stored on punch cards. The engine was to store information in a memory unit that would allow it to make decisions and then carry out instructions. The Analytical Engine was also never built.
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2205
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
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