ELECTRO-MECHANICAL DEVICES
These are counting devices that could be operated both electrically and mechanically. Electro-mechanical devices include the following:
- Blaise Pascal machine
- Gottfried Leibniz Machine
- Jacquard’s loom
- Charles Babbage’s machines
- Hollerith’s census machine
Pascaline: The first mechanical digital calculator (adding machine) was invented by Blaise Pascal in Paris in 1642. It was referred to as the numerical wheel calculator being the world’s first mechanical adding machine. It is a gear-driven mechanical machine, which performed whole-number addition and subtraction. Pascaline has a number of wheels with teeth on them. The first wheel counts units, second counts tens, third counts hundred and so on. Moving the wheels forward yields addition and moving the wheels backward yields subtraction.
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