Blaise Pascal's Influence On American History

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It is said that when history looks upon the life of an individual when their time has passed; it is not the dates on the tombstone that define the man but the dash in between. Such was the case in the life of theologian, philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal. Pascal was born on the 19th of June 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand France and died at the age of 39 of tuberculosis on the 19th August 1662 in Paris, but the bulk of his career, his success and life achievement began in his early years. As a young boy, Pascal’s lost his mother and soon afterward his father moved the family, Blaise and his two sisters to Paris. Pascal’s father, Étienne Pascal was a mathematician himself and taught Pascal Latin and Greek, which at the time was considered …show more content…

The “Blaise Pascaline,” as referred to in [3] would be considered today as an early version of a calculator. This project derived in part from helping out his father who had been promoted as a tax clerk, a job which required him to perform long calculations at work. Only one other mechanical device was known to add up figures before the Pascaline and that was known as the Schickard's calculating clock, created by German professor Wilhelm Schickard. Unlike Schickard device, Pascal’s calculator had a larger number of production and use despite the somewhat unreliability of the device. The device consisted of a wheel with eight movable parts for dialing and each part corresponding to a particular digit in a number. It worked by using gears and pins to add integers; addends were entered by hand and carriers from one column to the next were broadcast internally by falling weights lifted and dropped by the pins attached to the gears. It could even be manipulated to subtract, multiply and divide if one knew their way around the Pascaline. Subtraction was done by adding the nines complement version of the number being subtracted. Multiplication; accomplished by repeating additions and division performed by repeating subtractions. Balise Pascals went on to inspire directly inspired further work on calculating machines by other inventors such as Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel

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