People

Key Points: Viktor Bunyakovsky was a famous mathematician who made significant contributions to probability and number theories. He was also credited for his early discovery of the Cauchy-Schwarz Inequality.  He was also a mechanic, which helped in his inventions like the pantograph and planimeter. He was very interested in different types of calculating devices, and […]

Key Points: William M. Briggs spent the majority of his life as a farmer and miller. He only had one patent for an invention he created near the end of his life — an arithmetical calculator. His arithmetical calculator, made of wood, paper, and metal, worked exceptionally well. There is no record of Briggs’ calculator […]

Key Points Beaucourt’s original device was not put into production until his son carried it forward with a new patent. The keys of his adding device looks similar to a rotary phone. Calculating with the machine was simple but a little slow. In 1642, Blaise Pascal invented the first mechanical calculator. Inventors continued to invent […]

Key Points: A column keyboard adder, US Patent 351487, was patented by Frank Bone of Lebanon, Ohio in 1886. Besides his career as a civil engineer, Frank A. Bone authored two different atlases on Warren County, Ohio. This adding machine featured nine keys with digits 1 to 9. Frank Bone was a civil engineer from […]

Key Points: Although he maintained a steady and successful careers in engineering and as a professor, Friedrich’s name will live on because of his contribution to computers: a column adding machine. Another highpoint in his innovated career are his writings about Imaginative Gravity Escapement. Many members of Friedrich’s family were inventors and innovators in their […]

Key Points: John Ballou Newbrough was a bit of a Renaissance man, who delved into many subjects, from dentistry and medicine to mining for gold and inventing new tools and devices! The adding machines were not a priority for John, and the devices were never produced. One of the wildest facts about him is that […]

Key Points In 1882 António Júlio de Azevedo Coutinho patented an adding machine. António Júlio de Azevedo Coutinho’s invention never went into production and only remained on paper. History of Computers and Computing, Calculating tools, Gadgets, António Júlio de Azevedo Coutinho António Júlio de Azevedo Coutinho In the early 1880s, the young Portugal António Júlio […]

Key Points Jan Józef Baranowski wore many hats during his life, including financier, economist, nobleman, linguist, engineer, and inventor. He was a polyglot who was fluent in French, German, Russian, and English, and published one of the first Polish/English dictionaries.   Jan Józef Baranowski was born in Poland in 1805 and died in 1888 in […]

Key Points Policarpo de Balzola was a mathematician and inventor who lived from1813 to 1879. Policarpo de Balzola invented the machine called the Teclado Aritmético (Arithmetic Keyboard)—a calculating machine that looked like a piano. Policarpo de Balzola was a Basque mathematician and inventor from Irun, Spain. He only received an elementary school education, supplemented with […]

Key Points James Appleby invented the money-calculating machine in 1856. The money calculation was done by counting the value of the beads. Each bead had a different figure; therefore, an accountant could quickly perform complex mathematics by shifting high-valued beads James Appleby never married or had children. He died in 1891 in Shaftesbury. It’s often […]

Key Points Vladimir Sergeevich Lukianov (Владимир Сергеевич Лукьянов) was born in Moscow, on 17 March 1902. In 1941 Lukianov constructed a two-dimensional version of the Hydraulic Integrator that was put into production. It was used in the construction of power plants, mine buildings, geology, building thermal physics, metallurgy, rocket science, and many other areas. Vladimir […]

Key Points: Percy Ludgate invented the second analytical machine in history — now referred to as the general-purpose Turing-complete computer. “Turing-complete” means that any real-world multipurpose computer or computer language can simulate any other real-world multipurpose computer or computer language’s computational aspects. Ludgate’s brilliant career ended when he died of pneumonia at the young age […]

Key Points: Martin Wiberg was a Swedish inventor known for inventing a smaller calculating machine than those invented previously. Wiberg was recognized by the Swedish government, received several medals and awards and was noticed by the French emperor Napoleon III. His inventions ranged from mechanical letterboxes, heating devices for railroad carriage components, speed controls, match-manufacturing […]

Key Points Louis Pierre Couffignal (16 March 1902 – 4 July 1966) was a French mathematician and cybernetics pioneer. Couffignal was the director of Laboratoire de Calcul Mecanique at the Institut Blaise Pascal for almost 20 years. There is also another Frenchman, who devised binary-based calculating machine even before Couffignal—Raymond Valtat. Louis Couffignal Louis Pierre […]

Key Points In 1821 Charles Babbage grew tired of manually calculating and decided to consider mechanical calculations.  The English mathematician and inventor is credited with having conceived the first automatic digital computer. Although Charles Babbage thought of the first digital computer, the design was not completed in his lifetime.  Charles Babbage is credited for designing […]