As a youth, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was asked to assist his father in calculations relating to tax returns. Pascal, a future mathematician and natural philosopher, decided that addition and ...

Adding Machines Stylus-Operated Adding Machines In 1642, while he was still a teenager, the Frenchman Blaise Pascal invented one of the first machines that could add automatically. Numbers were ...

Tax preparers no longer use a horse to get to work or a washtub to rinse laundry, yet many continue to keep around a once-indispensable tool that’s slowly becoming antique. “I recently thought of ...