Wilhelm Schickard
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- The calculating clock (1623), the first known geared calculator
- Nationality
- German
The Tübingen professor who built Kepler a calculating machine twenty years before Pascal, and whose only copy burned before any outsider saw it.
Orientalist, mathematician, astronomer and engraver at the University of Tübingen — one of the last generations able to be all of those at once. A 1623 letter to Johannes Kepler describes a Rechenuhr, a calculating clock: gears that added and subtracted six-digit numbers with automatic carry, topped by Napier's bones mounted on rotating cylinders for multiplication.
Two were put into production, one intended for Kepler. The workshop burned in 1624 and took the half-finished build with it. Schickard died of plague in 1635 along with most of his family, and the machine was forgotten so completely that Pascal held the credit for three hundred years. The sketches only resurfaced in the 1950s among Kepler's papers, and Bruno von Freytag-Löringhoff built a working reconstruction around 1960. That settles the question of who was first — but Pascal's machine survived in physical form, which history has repeatedly shown to matter more than priority.