12 Facts About Wilhelm Schickard

Wilhelm Schickard was a German professor of Hebrew and astronomy who became famous in the second part of the 20th century after Franz Hammer, a biographer of Johannes Kepler, claimed that the drawings of a calculating clock, predating the public release of Pascal's calculator by twenty years, had been discovered in two unknown letters written by Schickard to Johannes Kepler in 1623 and 1624.

Wilhelm Schickard's machine was the first of several designs of direct entry calculating machines in the 17th century .

The Wilhelm Schickard machine was particularly notable for its integration of an ingenious system of rotated Napier's rods for multiplication with a first known design for an adding machine, operated by rotating knobs for input, and with a register of rotated numbers showing in windows for output.

Taton has argued that Wilhelm Schickard's work had no impact on the development of mechanical calculators.

Wilhelm Schickard was a universal scientist and taught biblical languages such as Aramaic as well as Hebrew at Tubingen.

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Wilhelm Schickard'sresearch was broad and included astronomy, mathematics and surveying.

Amongst its uses, Wilhelm Schickard suggested it would help in the laborious task of calculating astronomical tables.

Whilst Wilhelm Schickard noted that the adding machine was working his letters mention that he had asked a professional, a clockmaker named Johann Pfister to build a finished machine.

Wilhelm Schickard's machine used clock wheels which were made stronger and were therefore heavier, to prevent them from being damaged by the force of an operator input.

Wilhelm Schickard's mechanism was chronologically earlier but was never able to be used and appears to have had serious design flaws.

In 1718 an early biographer of Kepler, Michael Gottlieb Hansch, had published letters from Wilhelm Schickard that described the calculating machine, and his priority was mentioned in an 1899 publication, the Stuttgarter Zeitschrift fur Vermessungswesen.

Pascal tried to create a smoothly functioning adding machine for use by his father initially, and later for commercialisation, while the adding machine in Wilhelm Schickard's design appears to have been introduced to assist in multiplication .