Invention Designed for Addition
Necessity inspired the invention of the abacus as the need grew to count higher than fingers and toes.
Tally marks left behind on stone and wood, show displays that a form of addition was used by early man.
Evolution brought on material objects, and stones or shells were used as equals to worth; one shell equaled one horse.
Addition moved forward as human’s built societies and the need to track records expanded.
The abacus, invented by the Chinese in 3000 BC, is a counting device for advanced addition which uses mounted rods with balls or beads that move up and down to tally multiple systems of numbers.
The abacus was innovative in that each bead or ball could stand for a group of numbers, representing a variety of things, such as: one bead is equal to ten bags of grain.
Moving a bead up and down a rod may seem slow and tedious today, but the abacus was the first tool for quick addition; and is still in use today in some parts of the world.
As the need for faster calculation was realized, innovative minds saw opportunity in finding a way to make subtraction, addition, multiplication, and division a speedier process.
The first famously noted machine invented for addition was built by the Frenchman Blaise Pascal in 1642, which was born from a need to help his father’s work as a regional tax official.
“The Pascaline” was a machine for addition and was comprised of a piece of wood with eight moveable dials that could sum a number up to eight digits long.
Each full rotation of a dial would activate the next highest number of the dial on the right to roll over and lock, continuing the process over and over as the counter worked it’s way through zero to nine, resulting with the highest possible number of 999,999,999.
As the base of innovations for calculation to come, the Pascaline gave plenty of room for improvement as it could only be used for addition.
Merchants created an economic demand for a simpler way of bookkeeping, which involved not just addition, but subtraction, multiplication, and division as well.
The demand was met by the German inventor Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1673, with his invention called “The VonLeibniz Calculator”, which could quickly multiply and divide through a continuous process of addition and subtraction.
150 years later in 1820, the arithmometer was invented by Frenchman Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar to carry out addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and was mass produced for commercial use in offices everywhere up to World War I.
The American Arithmometer Company, later named Burroughs Corporation, continued the evolution of the adding machine into the electronic era.
The advancement of using electronics for addition and beyond led to development of the micro chip in 1958 by Texas Instruments, when the hand held calculator was first introduced.
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