The first adding machine, a precursor of the digital computer, was devised in 1642 by the French scientist, mathematician, and philosopher Blaise Pascal. This device employed a series of ten-toothed wheels, each tooth representing a digit from 0 to 9. The wheels were connected so that numbers could be added to each other by advancing the wheels by a correct number of teeth. In the 1670s the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz improved on this machine by devising one that could also multiply.

The French inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard, in designing an automatic loom, used thin, perforated wooden boards to control the weaving of complicated designs. During the 1880s the American statistician Herman Hollerith conceived the idea of using perforated cards, similar to Jacquard's boards, for processing data. Employing a system that passed punched cards over electrical contacts, he was able to compile statistical information for the 1890 United States census.

The Analytical Engine

Also in the 19th century, the British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage worked out the principles of the modern digital computer. He conceived a number of machines, such as the Difference Engine, that were designed to handle complicated mathematical problems. Many historians consider Babbage and his associate, the mathematician Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, the true pioneers of the modern digital computer. One of Babbage's designs, the Analytical Engine, had many features of a modern computer. It had an input stream in the form of a deck of punched cards, a "store" for saving data, a "mill" for arithmetic operations, and a printer that made a permanent record. Babbage failed to put this idea into practice, though it may well have been technically possible at that date.

Early Computers

Analogue computers began to be built in the late 19th century. Early models calculated by means of rotating shafts and gears. Numerical approximations of equations too difficult to solve in any other way were evaluated with such machines. Lord Kelvin built a mechanical tide predictor that was a specialized analogue computer. During World Wars I and II, mechanical and, later, electrical analogue computing systems were used as torpedo course predictors in submarines and as bombsight controllers in aircraft.