1,2,3, Calculate it!
Come and discover the history of calculating machines In 2023, we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the birth of Blaise Pascal. Great opportunity to undertake a little tour of calculating machines, before the era of our calculators and computers. Long ago, men used basic material means to calculate: tokens, pebbles, dust tables, etc. Then a step was taken with the Chinese abacus invented in the XII century and which is still used today! But it is from the XVII century that we see the appearance of new calculating machines, so-called mechanical machines, the system of slide rule to the machine with sticks or cranks, genius «machines» based on grooved systems or wheels with variable number of teeth, to perform additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions. These machines were widely manufactured and used until the 1970s, dethroned by the appearance of electronic calculators. A team of enthusiasts and collectors (from the University Grenoble Alpes, the ArScAn laboratory of the University Paris-Nanterre and the MISS) will be present with several copies of these machines to show them to you, explain how they work and of course make you try them.