Adding Machines

What do you do when you want to balance your check book? Whip out the good old calculator right? Well, have you ever wondered how people in the olden days added sums? Well, they used what we now know as adding machines. If you’ve been to any of the older mom and pop stores, you might have noticed a quaint contraption that looks like a cross between an old conductor’s ticket maker and a really big calculator. This is nothing but an adding machine. Simply put, an adding machine adds numbers. While you can use this sort of an adding machine to add and subtract, it did little else. In fact, these adding machines were the predecessor of the calculator that we use nowadays.

Adding machines have been around for centuries, if not millennia. Nearly all f the older civilizations had some sort of an adding machine. Probably the oldest adding machine known to man was the abacus – an ancient Chinese invention that is still used in some countries to this day. This was a very basic adding machine, but a skilled user could use it to do a wide variety of arithmetic calculations including subtraction, multiplication and even division. Some practitioners of the abacus have also shown great versatility in being able to do complex functions with it as well. But the western world would not learn of this specialized adding machine till much later.

A far as the west was concerned, the first adding machines in the strict sense of the term came into being sometime around the 17th century. If some really old relative of yours trained to be an engineer, chances are you might find a slide rule lying around your house. This too was an adding machine. Although it does not look anything like the calculator we use nowadays, it is capable of doing nearly everything that a calculator can do. And more! However, learning to use a slide rule or similar adding machines is a tricky affair. Most new users are bound to make errors. And unless you are really good at using it, your data will be full of mistakes.

Historically, a Wilhelm Schickard is credited with being the first man in the west to come up with a full working model of an adding machine. But we don’t have access to his adding machine as it was reportedly destroyed in a fire. But then came along Blaise Pascal and he used most of the principles of Schickard’s adding machine to produce an adding machine of his own. It is claimed that he had no knowledge of Schickard’s machine. But the end result was remarkably similar. Pascal called his adding machine the addometer. And this remains the first available adding machine known to people all over the world.

There were several other adding machines that evolved from Pascal’s addometer. There were adding machines based on the slide rule, there were adding machines based on dials and there were also adding machines that used a combination of chains to produce their results. Nearly all of them were based on Pascal’s invention and we can conclude that Blaise Pascal was the man who made adding machines popular in the west.