Wilhelm Schickard

Wilhelm Schickard (April 22 1592 – October 24 1635) was a German polymath who built one of the first calculating machines in 1623.

Schickard was born in Herrenberg and educated at the University of Tübingen, receiving his first degree, B.A. in 1609 and M.A. in 1611. He studied theology and oriental languages at Tübingen until 1613. In 1613 he became a Lutheran minister continuing his work with the church until 1619 when he was appointed professor of Hebrew at the University of Tübingen.

Schickard was a universal scientist and taught biblical languages such as Aramaic as well as Hebrew at Tübingen. In 1631 he was appointed professor of astronomy at the University of Tübingen. His research was broad and included astronomy, mathematics and surveying. He invented many machines such as one for calculating astronomical dates and one for Hebrew grammar. He made significant advances in mapmaking, producing maps which were far more accurate than those which were previously available at the time. cite web |author=History of Computing Foundation |url=http://www.thocp.net/biographies/schickard_wilhelm.html |title=Wilhelm Schickard entry at The History of Computing Project|accessdate=2007-07-19]
thumb_|Drawing_of_a_triquetrum by Wilhelm Schickard

Long before Pascal and Leibniz, Schickard invented a calculating machine in 1623. Contemporaries called his machine the "Speeding Clock." It preceded the less versatile "Pascaline" of Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner by twenty years. Schickard's letters to Johannes Kepler show how to use the machine for calculating astronomical tables. The machine could add and subtract six-digit numbers, and indicated an overflow of this capacity by ringing a bell; to add more complex calculations, a set of Napier's bones were mounted on it. Schickard's letters mention that the original machine was destroyed in a fire while still incomplete. The designs were lost until the 19th century; a working replica was finally constructed in 1960.

Schickard's machine was not programmable. The first "design" of a programmable computer came roughly 200 years later (Charles Babbage). And the first "working" program-controlled machine was completed more than 300 years later (Konrad Zuse's Z3, 1941).

He was, among his other skills, a renowned wood and copperplate engraver.

Wilhelm Schickard died of the bubonic plague in Tübingen, October 24 in 1635 or maybe one day earlier.

In 1651, Giovanni Riccioli named a crater on one of his moon maps the Schickard crater.The Institute for Computer Science at the University of Tübingen is called the Wilhelm-Schickard-Institut für Informatik in his honor.

References

External links

*MacTutor Biography|id=Schickard
* [http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/schickard.html Wilhelm Schickard, father of the computer age] by Juergen Schmidhuber