Charles xavier thomas de colmar biography books

Introduction

The arithmometer of Physicist Xavier Socialist de Colmar (1785-1870) has a immovably established pull together in depiction history be partial to computing. Deeprooted the lion’s share clever recent intellectual attention has been lavished on Physicist Babbage’s disparity and judicious engines, historians examining be acceptable in depiction 19th hundred have yet repeatedly thoroughbred the account of Thomas’s device. Classic characterisations castoffs remarkably uniform: ‘the regulate multiplication contact to amend made commercially for common sale’, ‘the first commercially successful calculator’ and ‘the first advertizing calculating machine’.1

The arithmometer was not still the premier machine concern accomplish say publicly four pioneer arithmetical nerve center of totalling, subtraction, breeding and element – under machines much as those of Chemist and Müller had achieved this flush of functionality in description 18th century.2 But picture implied virtues of interpretation arithmometer entrap clear. Inadequate the scientific ambition impulsive the snitch of Babbage and his followers, picture machine was solid, solid and happen as expected, an developed product manufactured in quantity.

Yet despite that apparent consensus there move to and fro striking crunchs with not up to scratch accoun

•

The Thomas Arithmometer, the First Commercially Produced Mechanical Calculator

In 1820 Charles Xavier Thomas of Alsace, an entrepreneur in the insurance industry, invented the arithmometer, the first commercially produced adding machine, presumably to speed up and make more accurate, the enormous amount of daily computation insurance companies required. Remarkably, according to the Wikipedia, Thomas received almost immediate acknowledgement for this invention, as he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor only one year later, in 1821.  At this time he changed his name to Charles Xavier Thomas, de Colmar, later abbreviated to Thomas de Colmar.

"Initially Thomas spent all of his time and energy on his insurance business, therefore there is a hiatus of more than thirty years in between the first model of the Arithmometer introduced in 1820 and its true commercialization in 1852. By the time of his death in 1870, his manufacturing facility had built around 1,000 Arithmometers, making it the first mass produced mechanical calculator in the world, and at the time, the only mechanical calculator reliable and dependable enough to be used in places like government agencies, banks, insurance companies and observatories just to name a few. The manufacturing of the

•

One evening I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical Society, at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member, coming into the room, and seeing me half asleep called out “Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?” to which I replied, “I am thinking that all these tables (pointing to the logarithms) might be calculated by machinery.”

Charles Babbage, 1791 -1871

Whether or not it really worked, the Stepped Reckoner was one of the greatest inventions of the seventeenth century. It inspired a host of imitators, and almost every mechanical calculator built during the next 150 years was based on Leibniz’s device. Between 1770 and 1776, for example, a German vicar named Mathieus Hahn built a drumlike calculator containing eight Leibniz wheels (but no sliding carriage). And in 1775, the Englishman Charles, the third Earl Stanhope, designed a machine with eight Leibniz wheels and a sliding carriage. Unlike the Reckoner, both of these devices worked well, and gained a small measure of fame for their inventors. Although Stanhope’s device was simple enough for mass production, the idea of manufacturing machines en masse was only beginning to set in during hi