Wilhelm Schickard (April 22, 1592 – October 23, 1635) was a German polymath who built the first computer in 1623. Wilhelm Schickard This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... April 22 is the 112th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (113th in leap years). ... Events January 30 - The death of Pope Innocent IX during the previous year had left the Papal throne vacant. ... October 23 is the 296th day of the year (297th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Events February 10 - The Académie française in Paris is expanded to become a national academy for the artistic elite. ... Leonardo da Vinci is seen as an epitome of the Renaissance man or polymath // A polymath (Greek polymathÄ“s, πολυμαθής, meaning having learned much,[1]), Renaissance man or Homo universalis are common terms to describe a person well educated in a wide variety of subjects or fields in which he excels. ...

Schickard was born in Herrenberg. Contemporaries called his machine the Speeding Clock. It precedes the less versatile Pascaline of Blaise Pascal and the calculator of Gottfried Leibniz 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 aid more complex calculations, a set of Napier's bones were mounted on it. The designs were lost until the nintenth century; a working replica was finally constructed in 1960. The German article for Herrenberg is located here Herrenberg is a town in the middle of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, about 30km south of Stuttgart and 20km from Tübingen. ... A Pascaline, signed by Pascal in 1652 Blaise Pascal invented the second mechanical calculator, called alternatively the Pascaline or the Arithmetique, in 1645, the first being that of Wilhelm Schickard in 1623. ... Blaise Pascal (pronounced ), (June 19, 1623–August 19, 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. ... It has been suggested that this article be split into multiple articles. ... Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630) was a German Lutheran mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, and a key figure in the 17th century astronomical revolution. ... Napiers bones are an abacus invented by John Napier for calculation of products and quotients of numbers. ...

Schickard's machine, however, 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). Charles Babbage (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, mechanical engineer and (proto-) computer scientist who originated the idea of a programmable computer. ... Konrad Zuse (1992) Statue in Bad Hersfeld Konrad Zuse (June 22, 1910 – December 18, 1995) was a German engineer and computer pioneer. ... Konrad Zuses Z3 was the first working programmable, fully automatic machine, whose attributes, with the addition of conditional branching, have often been the ones used as criteria in defining a computer. ...

Wilhelm Schickard died in Tübingen, in 1635. Tübingen, Neckar front Tübingen, a traditional university town of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, is situated 20 miles southwest of Stuttgart, on a ridge between the River Neckar and the Ammer. ...

Misc.

• The Schickard crater on the moon is named after Schickard.
• Schickard wrote science fiction stories.^{[citation needed]}

Schickard is a lunar impact crater of the form called a walled-plain. ...

External links

• O'Connor, John J.; Edmund F. Robertson "Wilhelm Schickard". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.  
• Wilhelm Schickard, father of the computer age by Juergen Schmidhuber
• Computer history speedup since 1623
• Schickard moon crater