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FIGURE 1.3
This illustration from Gregor Reisch's
Margarita Philosophica
, published in
1503, shows two aids to manual calculating. The person on the left is using a tablet; the
person on the right is adding numbers using a counting board, a type of abacus.
(Heritage
Images/Corbis)
anism invented by Leibniz to create the Arithmometer, the first commercially successful
calculator. Many insurance companies purchased Arithmometers to help their actuaries
compute rate tables more rapidly [9].
Swedish publisher Georg Scheutz was intimately familiar with printing errors as-
sociated with the production of mathematical tables. He resolved to build a machine
capable of automatically calculating and typesetting table values. Scheutz knew about
the earlier work of English mathematician Charles Babbage, who had demonstrated how
a machine could compute the values of polynomial functions through the method of
