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Clockwork Computers
by Mike Morris
Janaury 11, 2001
The Eccentrics
The Renaissance, that great flowering of European civilization, ushered in an almost frantic age of scientific and artistic discovery. The shackles of the dark ages broke; people began to exchange ideas without fear. It was in this climate of optimism and freedom that the first small steps were made towards the invention of the thinking machine.
The early tools were clumsy and slow. Gears and pulleys attempted to duplicate some of the functions performed by the billions of synapses in the human brain. The scientists who wrestled with the problems of computing in a mechanical age were an unusual breed. The computer nerds of the time were mostly brilliant eccentrics, just as they are today.
John Napier was an eccentric Scotsman who left St Andrews University without obtaining a degree. Mathematics was only a hobby for him, yet he invented logarithms, and produced several mathematical formulas.
He also invented a mechanical method for multiplying, dividing, and computing square roots.
Napier’s bones were actually ivory strips (strips of paper for less rich users), which when combined would produce answers to problems. Later, the slide rule was to make use of this principle rather more neatly.
In 1622, William Oughtred in England developed the circular slide rule, based on the bones. All clockwork computers use this principle of the juxtaposition of mechanical parts to represent numerical answers to a given problem. In 1650, Oughtred, in collaboration with Edmund Gunter, built a better slide-rule and two hundred years later, a Frenchman, Amedee Amenheim added a movable double-sided cursor, and the modern slide rule was born.
William Schickard, a German, invented a calculating clock in 1624, which could add and subtract, and rang a bell when an overflow condition occurred. A set of Napier’s bones was mounted on the machine as a memory aid for multiplication problems.
The invention had a turbulent existence. Machine and plans were lost and forgotten in the war that was going on at the time, to be rediscovered in 1935, lost again in the turmoil of the second world war, and rediscovered by the same man in 1956.
A calculating clock was reconstructed in 1960. It worked perfectly.
Blaising the Trail
In 1642, the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, then only 18 years old, built a numerical calculating machine, with 10-toothed cogwheels to represent the digits zero to nine. There were eight cogs in all, and when one wheel reached ten notches, the next wheel moved one notch, and so on. The invention was called a Pascaline.
To illustrate just how science can be used for evil, this awful machine was used to help his father collect taxes.
Gottfried Leibnitz, also a German, and like Pascal, a philosopher, improved on Pascal’s calculator. His piece of clockwork could add, subtract, divide, and multiply. This ambitious project was started in 1671, but the machine was not completed until 1694. It was never popular because of its continuing mechanical flaws.
It wasn’t until 1820 that a more practical four-function calculator was invented. Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchman, invented the arithmometer, which was widely used until the First World War.
By the beginning of the 18th Century, it was realized that an increasingly sophisticated technology was running far ahead of the capabilities of the clockwork computers. During the next 100 years, though the existing calculators were used, no new computer advances were made.
Success and Sabotage
In the 1800s, science was racing ahead. In 1780, Benjamin Franklin had discovered electricity, and this was to revolutionize later technology. Inventions began to change the industrial landscape, and to threaten the livelihood of manufacturing workers.
In 1805, Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented an automatic loom, which was controlled by wooden punch cards. Different functions could be programmed into these, and this idea was later incorporated into use with computers. The word ‘sabotage’ was born when disaffected Luddites destroyed machinery by throwing their sabots - or shoes - into the mechanism.
In 1820, Phillip Matthaus Hahn built and sold a small number of calculating machines, which were accurate to 12 digits, and de Colmar, mentioned previously, invented his long-lived arithmometer.
The 1800s were the years of mass communication, when the telegraph and telephone were invented, and newspapers flourished. While these did not directly affect mechanical computers, they were to transform succeeding generations of calculating machines.
In 1822 in England, Charles Babbage designed a Difference Machine to calculate logarithms. The machine was never built. Babbage was a man ahead of his times, whose ideas raced beyond the abilities of the technology of the day.
In 1833, he designed the Analytical Machine, which had an input device, storage, a processor, a control unit (or instruction sequencer), and an output device. Once again, the machine was never produced because of technical difficulties.
However, Babbage stands as one of the founders of computer technology, whose ideas helped found the modern computer industry. Pamphlets were written about his computer, and Lady Ada Byron, daughter of the poet, documented his work. She even wrote programs for the Analytical Machine. In 1855, George and Edward Scheutz of Stockholm built the first practical mechanical computer based on Babbage’s work.
Born in the USA
In the U.S., there was a ferment of technological innovation. Whereas in Europe, much scientific development was produced by gifted rich amateurs, and tended to be theoretical, here technology was a practical matter. Money could be made by anyone clever enough to invent a useful device.
In 1886, William Burroughs developed the first commercially successful adding machine, and in 1889, Herman Hollerith got his patent for the Hollerith tabulating machine, which he had built in 1884.
The tabulator, which used punch cards to hold information, was built to conduct the 1890 census. The census of 1880 had taken seven years to complete. With Hollerith’s machine, the 1890 results were tabulated in six weeks. This was the machine of the future, and it used electrical power.
This invention sounded the death knoll for the clockwork computer. The tremendous success and practicability of the Hollerith machine guaranteed its future development. New giants of industry were waiting in the wings to take advantage of the technology, and while Europeans would continue to develop new ideas, the practical, business-oriented approach of the U.S. insured that it would dominate the computer industry for the next century.
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