Category: Timeline Stories

In the history of computers and computing, there are several figures who are tremendously important despite never actually inventing a thing. One such individual is Johann Paul Bischoff (1736-1811), adviser in the court of the Margrave Karl Alexander of Brandenburg-Ansbach in Ansbach, Bavaria. In the last quarter of the 18^th century, Bischoff undertook several long trips to take a look personally at the calculating machines and instruments, that he had heard of, in order to describe them in a book.

After spending more than 16 years collecting information (from 1788), in 1804 Bischoff finished the manuscript for a book, that is a comprehensive account of the history of computing tools and methods used until then. The manuscript contained a meticulous compilation of virtually everything known for calculating methods and devices, from calculation with fingers and Napier’s Bones to the calculating machines of Pascal, Morland, Grillet, Leibniz, Poleni, Lepine, Leupold, Poetius, Boistissandeau, Hahn, Müller, and Reichold.

The book of Bischoff was the second comprehensive representation in this area, after Jacob Leupold’s Theatrum arithmetico-geometricum from 1727. Unlike his predecessor however, Bischoff’s work has never been printed in his time, but as late as 1990 (Versuch einer Geschichte der Rechenmaschine (Attempt at a History of Calculating Machines), publisher: Systhema-Verlag, editor: Stephan Weiss). The book has two parts: Part 1—”Concerning the Simple Tools” carries a historical overview and Part 2—”About Calculating Engines with Wheels” has technical descriptions of the engines. The book concludes with the 29 plates, all beautiful technical drawings.

Interestingly, mentioning Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner in the ‘simple tools’ section Bischoff says: the realization of his idea seems possible to me, but it seems like much work to me for little use and therefore I don’t think it worth the trouble to lose more time on it. And then: all the trouble so far couldn’t improve nor replace Napier’s counting sticks with better tools. Everything that was done to make them better or simpler to use concerned only the form, and not the essence.

From the end of the 19^th century, the manuscript was kept in the library of the Technical University of Berlin. Part of this library was destroyed in a fire during WWII (in 1943), and the remaining part was carried away by Russian soldiers at the end of the war. Thus the manuscript was lost. Only two undated transcripts from the beginning of the 20^th century survived to our time (maybe there is something more in Russian archives?). Besides detailed text descriptions, Bischoff’s manuscript also contained many tables, sketches, and large colored drawings. Unfortunately except for some sheets, most of them are lost. Only poor-quality black-and-white photographs of all drawings, taken at the beginning of the 20^th century, survived to the present.

Biography of Johann Paul Bischoff

Johann Paul Bischoff was born on 20 February 1736, in Sonneberg, Thuringia, to Johann Jacob Bischoff (1706-1757) and Anna Margaretha Dreßel (1707-1767). Johann Jacob Bischoff and Anna Margaretha Dreßel married on 31 Jan 1729 in Sonneberg, and from 1729 until 1749 they had 11 children (5 sons and 6 daughters). Johann Paul was the second son.

Bischoff served almost entire his life as a civil clerk (Kriegs- und Domänenrat, adviser in matters of war and the land) in the court of the Margrave Karl Alexander of Brandenburg-Ansbach in Ansbach, Bavaria. He was something like an Architect and Planning Director of the Court. To the present time are standing several buildings in Ansbach, designed by Bischoff, as between them is the own house of Bischoff (see the nearby image), built in 1799/1800 (Feuchtwanger Straße 1), a hospital from 1805 (Kronacher Straße 8), and a dairy farm, that was built in 1795/96 (Steingruberstraße 2).

Johann Bischoff married Anna Barbara Bauersachs (1738-1787) on 11 July 1758, in Sonneberg. The couple had 7 children—3 sons and 4 daughters.

Johann Paul Bischoff died on 14 April 1811, in Sonneberg.

The first true battery (so-called Voltaic Pile) was made in early 1800 by the celebrated Lombardian physicist Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (1745-1827). The volt, the standard unit of electric potential, was named in his honor in 1881.

In 1780, the anatomist and physician Luigi Aloisio Galvani (1737-1798), a friend of Volta (the two scientists exchanged much correspondence), was dissecting a frog affixed to a brass hook. When he touched its leg with his iron scalpel, the leg twitched. Galvani believed the energy that drove this contraction came from the leg itself, and called it animal electricity.

However, Volta disagreed with his friend, believing this phenomenon was caused by two different metals joined together by a moist intermediary. Volta verified his hypothesis through experiments and published the results in 1791. In 1794 he demonstrated that when two metals and brine-soaked cloth or cardboard are arranged in a circuit they produce an electric current. In early 1800, he stacked several pairs of alternating copper and zinc discs (electrodes) separated by cloth or cardboard soaked in brine (electrolyte) to increase the electrolyte conductivity. When the top and bottom contacts were connected by a wire, an electric current flowed through the voltaic pile and the connecting wire.

On 20 March 1800, Volta sent a long letter (in French, see the nearby image) from Como, Lombardy, to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society in London, of which Volta was also a fellow, announcing his invention (“which will no doubt astonish you”).

In April, Banks read the letter and was duly astonished. Volta’s pile was capable of generating a continuous current of electricity. This was a world apart from the static electricity of the celebrated Leyden jar and indeed a most astonishing discovery. No wonder Volta was so anxious to communicate it without delay to Banks and thereby to the Royal Society.

Banks was naturally obliged to keep Volta’s discovery confidential until it appeared in print in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions, but in the same April 1800, he leaks the contents of Volta’s letter to several acquaintances, including the surgeon Anthony Carlisle, who arranges for William Nicholson to view the letter. In May Carlisle and Nicholson constructed a Voltaic Pile according to Volta’s instructions. With this apparatus they discover the electrolysis (how an electric current leads to a chemical reaction) of water into hydrogen and oxygen, thus creating the field of electrochemistry.

In 1801 in Paris Volta gave a demonstration of his battery’s generation of electric current before Emperor Napoleon (see the picture below), who awarded Volta the Medal of the Legion of Honor and made him a count and a senator of the kingdom of Lombardy. In 1815 the Austrian emperor Francis I made him director of the philosophical faculty at the University of Padua. Later Volta went on to isolate methane, discover the methane-air-spark explosion (the basis for the internal combustion engine), and describe contact electricity, the result of contact between different metals, among many other firsts.

Biography of Alessandro Volta

Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was born was born in Como, Lombardy, duchy of Milan, on 18 February 1745. His native house is still preserved in the historic center of Como, Via Alessandro Volta 62 (see the nearby image ). On the right of the main door of the house number lies the tombstone with the inscription: “This was the ancestral home of Alessandro Volta”. On the day after his birth, 19 February 1745, Alessandro was baptized in the nearby Provostal church of San Donnino.

Alessandro Volta came from a distinguished Lombard family, ennobled by the municipality of Como and almost extinguished at that time, through its service to the church. One of his three paternal uncles was a Dominican, another a canon, and the third (also Alessandro) an archdeacon. Alessandro’s father, Filippo Maria Volta (born in 1692 and died around 1752), after eleven years as a Jesuit, withdrew in the early 1730s to propagate the line. His marriage in 1733 to Maria Maddalena de’Conti Inzaghi (died 1782) (she was from a noble Lombard family, the daughter of Count Giuseppe Inzaghi from Gratz, Stiria) produced seven children who survived childhood; three girls, two of whom became nuns; three boys who followed the careers of their paternal uncles; and Alessandro, the youngest, who narrowly escaped church recruitment by his first teachers, the Jesuits.

Alessandro spent most of his first years in the nearby town of Brunate, in the house of the artisan Ludovico Monti, a barometer builder. The Volta family was well-off and had several properties in the vicinity of Como, but it seems Filippo Volta was prodigal because when he died around 1752, he left his wife and children not particularly rich. Luckily, in 1756 Alessandro and his brothers inherited the riches of a wealthy uncle.

Alessandro’s childhood was rather worrying and he learned to speak so late, that his parents even feared that he was born dumb. He said his first words when was four, and slowly, he learned to speak fluently as late as the age of seven, but then he immediately began to reveal a lively curiosity towards natural phenomena, to the point that, in the anxiety of finding some shiny straws that, according to the local peasants, had to be gold, he risked drowning in the source of Monteverde, near Camnago.

Unfortunately, Filippo Volta died around 1752, and the care of the younger children, Alessandro and his sisters Marianna and Chiara, was taken by their uncle Alessandro Volta, archdeacon of the Como cathedral. After elementary studies in the family, the boy entered in 1757, at the age of 12, the local Jesuit’s School of Rhetoric in Como, and later was sent to continue his education at the Seminario Benzi. There his favorite authors were Tasso and Virgil and he amused himself by writing verses in Latin. Although as a child he had been slow to speak Italian, Volta now seemed to have a special talent for languages. Before he left school, he had learned Latin, French, English, and German.

Around 1760, Alessandro’s teacher, the Jesuit Father Girolamo Bonesi, a philosophy professor, tried in vain to persuade him to follow the priesthood. His uncle, Alessandro, also attempted to persuade him to study law. However, having finished the Seminary, Volta decided to drop formal studies and he became interested in electricity. Thus, by the age of sixteen, Alessandro already made up his mind to be a physicist. Next years he read the works of the greatest scientists of the time, and carried out his first studies on electricity between 1762 and 1765, together with his rich and eccentric friend, the future canon Giulio Cesare Gattoni (1741-1809).

In 1774, Volta started teaching as superintendent of public schools in Como. The following year he became an ordinary professor of Experimental Physics in the Gymnasium of Como. In 1777, he traveled for the first time with scientific purposes to Switzerland and France. Setting off in the company of Count Giovio, he brought along physics tools to detect altitudes, barometric pressures, and the quality of the air, and magnets for the search of iron minerals, besides obviously all the tools recently invented by himself.

In 1778, Volta obtained the new chair of Experimental Physics at the University of Pavia. He held the chair of experimental physics at the University for nearly 40 years and was widely idolized by his students. Following the discovery of the native air of the marshes (methane) in 1778, he invented a series of tools and devices, among which the so-called Volta’s pistol and the musket that, it is told, he used to go hunting birds in the area of Campora, around Como.

Alessandro Volta actively practiced the Catholic religion but was not prudish or ascetic. He was a large, vigorous man, who enjoyed his life. Let’s see how he is described by his friend Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (it was the same Lichtenberg, who was a friend of Johann Helfrich Müller), whom Volta visited in Göttingen in November 1784:
He is an extraordinary man. DeLuc is right: he wrote me once “qu’en Electricité Volta voyoit avec les yeux de Newton”. He is full of ideas and a raisonneur without peer. He had many instruments along; he unpacked them for me, and during his stay here I kept them in my own quarters. […] He is a handsome fellow, and during some extremely uninhibited hours, at a supper at my place when we talked wildly till about one o’clock, I noticed that he has an expert knowledge of the electricity in girls.

Just like his father, Alessandro Volta married at a venerable age to a much younger woman. Since 1789 he had a long love affair with a famous singer, Marianna Paris, but his family, and the emperor himself, did not allow the marriage, because the profession of singer was not of good repute. Thus Volta married on 22 September 1794 in the church of San Provino in Como, to Maria Teresa Alonsa Peregrini (born 1770), from a rich noble family. Surprisingly, the marriage was a happy one, and three sons were born: Zanino (1795-1869), Flaminio (1796-1814), and Luigi Tobia (1798-1876), Volta’s pride and joy. Despite his professional success, Volta tended to be a person inclined towards domestic life and this was more apparent in his later years. At this time he tended to live secluded from public life and more for the sake of his family.

Alessandro Volta is said to have been one of the greatest and most brilliant experimenters of his time. He retired in 1819 to his estate in Camnago, a frazione of Como (now named “Camnago Volta” in his honor). He died there on 5 March 1827, just after his 82^nd birthday, and was buried in Camnago.

Naturally, the first technology for producing kind of 3D models by mechanical means, which might be considered to be to some extent analogous to today’s 3D scanning and rapid prototyping (3D printing) technologies, was developed by a sculptor. In 1859 the French François Willème, who characterized himself as a painter, sculptor, photographer, and inventeur de la photosculpture, developed a method for 3D modeling, called sculpture photographique (photographing sculpture), mechanical sculpture, or sculptural portraits, which used photographic and mechanical means for 3D modeling of the human body.

In fact, there was another sculptor, Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon (1818-1881), who before Willème was attracted to photography as a medium for accurately depicting volumetric forms, but Adam-Salomon gave up sculpture for photography (and became the best French photographer of his time), while Willème envisioned the commercial and industrial applications of photography to the manufacture of sculpture.

In early 1860 Willème filed a patent application in France and obtained a patent on 14 August 1860, then another patent on 6 April 1861. Later he applied for British and US patents. US patent Nr. 43822 was granted on 9 August 1864 (see patent of Willème for Photographing Sculpture). A British patent was granted in early 1865. In the US patent is specified as:
This invention relates to an improved process termed “photo-sculpture” which is based on the employment of photography in connection with the pantograph. By this improved process I am enabled to produce sculpture exactly similar to the model, whether living or otherwise, with much greater rapidity, at a less cost, and by the aid of persons having no previous knowledge of the art. I may further lessen the time necessary for the sitting and produce sculpture of larger or smaller dimensions than the original, or in any other proportions desired.

Willème presented his invention to the Société française de photographie on 17 May 1861 but needed two more years to open a large studio at 42 Boulevard de l’Étoile off the Arc de Triomphe. Willème needed finances and formed a corporation for this purpose. Interestingly, one of the principal stockholders in the company was the banker Isaac Péreire, the grandson of Jacob-Rodrigues Pereire, the creator of the Pereire calculating machine. The studio (see the lower image) had a modern cupola, forty feet wide and thirty feet high constructed of iron mullions with blue and white panes of glass.

Willème’s studio was attended by the good company of the Second French Empire, including the imperial couple and its entourage, personalities of the artistic and literary world, and society women. The vogue of photosculpture even exceeded the French borders: similar studios opened in London in 1864, and in New York in 1866. Willème was invited to Madrid to make portraits of the royal family of Spain and was rewarded with the insignia of the order of Charles III of Spain. In his studio, according to the words of the journalist Henri de Parviel, A sculptor and the sun will become collaborators working together to fashion in 48 hours busts or statues of a hitherto unknown fidelity of such great boldness in outline and admirable likeness.

Although in 1867 the photosculpture of Willème was presented successfully at Exposition universelle d’art et d’industrie in Paris, at that time the passion for photosculpture had already reached its end, and the business declined, so in 1868 Willème left his workshop (although it continued to work for some more years without its founder) and returned to his hometown of Sedan.

What is the process of photosculpture?

It was the reproduction of persons or objects in 3-dimensions with only a minimal requirement for handwork, by taking a series of photos in the round and using them as synchronized photo projections to create a sculpture. To create a photosculpture Willème would arrange the subject on a circular platform in his rotunda laboratory, surrounded by 24 cameras (one every 15 degrees). He would then photograph his silhouette simultaneously with each camera. This set of photographic profiles contained the data for a complete representation of his subject in 3 dimensions.

Willème had now collected layer data for his subjects in the form of 24 different photographs of their profile. To create a 3D image of the subject he needed to make the information in each layer accessible by projecting each image onto a screen. Next, he translated each image into the movements required to fabricate each layer. This he accomplished using a pantograph (seen at the right side of the nearby image) attached to a cutter. Willème traced each profile with one end of the pantograph while the other end cut a sheet of wood with the exact same movement. The pantograph allowed the cuts to be smaller, larger, or the same size as the original projection. The layers of wood were then assembled to create the photosculpture rough armature which he would fill in with clay (or other suitable material) and then perhaps cast or paint it, to make it look like a traditional sculpture.

The client had a choice of the size of his photosculpture, and he could get a statuette measuring some 50 cm, a medallion with a smaller size, or a bust of full or half-size. He had a choice of the material as well—plaster of Paris, terra-cotta, biscuit, bronze, alabaster, and even metal-plated by galvanoplasty. The price of a photosculpture, depending on the size and materials used, was from 270 to 500 Francs, and the time needed for manufacturing was 2-4 days (a conventional sculptor would need 3-4 months and some 2-3000 Francs for a life-sized bust).

As the hand-cutting stage of Willème’s photosculpture could still considered to be a labor-intensive process, an interesting attempt to eliminate this stage from the reproduction process was made at the beginning of the 20^th century by the Italian engineer from Florence Carlo Baese di Castelvecchio (1877-1943), a grandson of Louis Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. He proposed and patented (US patent 774549) a technique for reproducing physical objects, which employs a photo-sensitive gelatin that expands in proportion to its exposure to light. In Baese’s technique, the object to be reproduced is photographed whilst being illuminated with graduated light, so as to achieve maximum depth of contrast. Then photographic plates are produced, through which light is exposed onto photo-sensitive gelatin. When treated with water, the photosensitive gelatin material expands to form a relief corresponding to the three-dimensional shape of the bust.

In 1890, Joseph E. Blanther, an alleged Austrian Count, with a rich career of swindling operations in both Europe and America, living then in Chicago, invented and later patented (see the patent of Blanther) a process for printing raised maps.

Biography of François Willème

Strangely, little is known about Willème’s life, we don’t even have a picture of him or his family, which is quite unusual for an artist and photographer (nearby you can see his only auto-portrait, made around 1865, using the photosculpture technology).

Auguste François Victor Willème was born in Sedan (Givonne), Ardennes, оn 27 May 1830. He was the son of a liquor retailer. As a boy, Willème took drawing lessons at a local school.

In the middle 1840s Willème and his family moved to Paris, where he enrolled at l’École des beaux-arts de Paris, to study painting under Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux (1815-1884), a specialist in history and portrait paintings. Willème also studied sculpture, making models for manufacturers of art bronzes, and in the early 1850s, he was attracted to photography, firstly to document his statuettes.

After developing photosculpture in 1859-1860, Willème founded a company, Société générale de photosculpture de France, headed by Willème and his associate—dealer, and artwork editor Charles de Marnyhac (1838-1897), which attracted investors, and in April 1863 opened a large studio in Paris. However, despite the initial success and glory, he was forced to leave his studio in early 1868 due to financial difficulties and returned to his hometown of Sedan in 1869. There he entered into a partnership with a local photographer and gave drawing classes at Collège Turenne. In Sedan, he also continued to make photo-sculptures.

During his career as a photosculptor, François Willème was rewarded with medals at many exhibitions and received the order of Charles III of Spain. Sometime after 1885, Willème and his wife retired to Roubaix, near Lille, where he died on 29 January 1905.

Various attempts for transmitting messages overland date back to the millennium before Christ, and include ingenious uses of homing pigeons, heliographs (mirrors), flags, torches, and beacons, but none of them gained wide currency. One of the earliest known today examples is described by the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus (523 BC-456 BC), in Agamemnon—when Troy was captured, the news was spread by lighting fires in ten signal towers specially built to announce the victory. In the 4^th century BC the Alexandrine engineers Cleoxenus and Democleitus invented the pyrsia, a system based on two signalers each with only two torches which, according to the way they were held, transmitted the letters of the alphabet.

Many centuries passed before the European inventors rediscovered the ancient secrets of communication. In 1499 the German Benedictine abbot and polymath Johannes Trithemius reinvented the ancient pyrsia in his Steganographia. In 1646 the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher published his treatise Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, which in addition to various inventions such as the projector, described a telecommunications experiment that he called cryptogamia catoptrica, again based on the principles of the pyrsia.

Due to the invention of the telescope, as well as many discoveries in physics, especially in acoustics, made at the beginning of the 17^th century, it was a matter of time before communication systems, based on them, were developed. It seems one of the pioneers in both areas was the Enlightenment natural philosopher and polymath Robert Hooke, considered as оne of the most brilliant and versatile figures of his time.

One of the areas, in which Robert Hooke worked, was acoustics. In the 1660s, in his experiments for the Royal Society (he was the Royal Society’s curator of experiments from 1662 and a fellow from 1663), Hooke discovered that sound could be transmitted over wire or string into an attached earpiece or mouthpiece. An acoustic string phone is said to have been made by him in the early 1660s, according to his remarkable book Micrographia, published in 1665, where he says:
’tis not impossible to hear a whisper a furlong’s distance, it having been already done; and perhaps the nature of the thing would not make it more impossible, though that furlong should be ten times multiply’d… for that [air] is not the only medium. I can assure the reader, that I have, by the help of a distended wire, propagated the sound to a very considerable distance in an instant, or with as seemingly quick a motion as that of light, at least, incomparably swifter than that, which at the same time was propagated through the air; and this not only in a straight line, or direct, but in one bended in many angles.

So, obviously, Hooke made experiments propagating the sound using a vibrating wire, a kind of sound communication, although his intention most probably was to use it for music transmission. What about his visual communications solution?

Hooke was an ingenious inventor (he was considered the greatest meckanick this day in the world) with a host of novel ideas covering a wide range of scientific instruments, including microscopes (see the nearby drawing of the Hooke microscope) and telescopes (he built the first reflecting telescope in 1673). Hooke demonstrated his great interest in telescopes, proposing a giant telescope to be erected in Gresham College and making a sketch of this. He also invented a lens-grinding machine (although it was apparently never built), to be used for very large lenses, and proposed a design of a folded telescope with mirrors that would allow a very long focal length, but not be as cumbersome. He invented an equatorial clock drive for a telescope, which is universally used today to maintain the alignment of a telescope with the stars by turning the mounting to counteract the rotation of the earth. Hooke also invented the iris diaphragm, used today in cameras.

As early as 17 February 1664 the Royal Society urged that Mr. Hooke set down in writing and produce to the Council his whole apparatus and management for speedy intelligence, but nothing was forthcoming until 29 February 1672, when he proposed a way for a very speedy conveyance of intelligence from place to place by the sight assisted with telescopes, to be employed on high places, by the correspondents using a secret character… The paper of this proposition, and the particulars of the manner of practicing it, were read, but not left by Mr. Hooke to be registered, but taken away by him. The Council ordered that some experiment should be made of this proposition at the next meeting, and on 7 March a test was performed across the Thames. After the test, The contrivance was applauded as very ingenious… [but] the President objected, that the use of it would be often hindered by hazy weather.

More than 10 years later, on 21 May 1684 Hooke presented to the Royal Society a lecture about Shewing a way how to communicate one’s mind at great distances. He said he had considered this matter some years prior to 1677, …but being [recently] laid by the great siege of Vienna, the last year, by the Turks, [it] did again revive in my memory.

Hooke’s apparatus (see the lower drawing) consisted of elevated thin wooden frames, supporting a screen, behind which were suspended deal-board characters with symbols, rigged via pulleys and control lines, and presenting the letters and special signs. At each structure, a telescope would be placed allowing the operator stationed at the site to view the communications of the adjacent site. For nighttime use, Hooke proposed a 2×5 array of lanterns disposed in a certain order, which may be veiled, or discovered, according to the method of character agreed on; by which all sorts of letters may be discovered clearly, and without ambiguity. With this equipment, Hooke thought …’tis possible to convey intelligence from any one high and eminent place, to any other that lies in sight of it, tho’ 30 or 40 miles distant, in as short a time as a man can write what he would have sent, and as suddenly to receive an answer, as he that receives it hath a mind to return it, or can it write down in paper… Nay, by the help of three, four, or more such eminent places, visible to each other… ’tis possible to convey intelligence, almost in a moment, to twice, thrice, or more times that distance, with a great certainty as by writing. Moreover, confirming the close association between communications and cryptography, Hooke noted that by cruptography (as he spelled it) the arbitrary mapping between symbols and letters permits the whole alphabet [to] be varied 10000 ways; so that none but the two extreme correspondents shall be able to discover the information conveyed.

The symbols, to be used in the communication, were selected by Hooke so that the communications could be made …with great ease, distinctness and secrecy. In addition to symbols, representing the letters of the alphabet, Hooke devised single-character control codes to be displayed above the message during transmission, providing eleven examples of these out-of-band signals, to signify special meanings, for example: “I am ready to communicate”, “I am ready to observe”, “I shall be ready presently”, “I see plainly what you show”, “Show the last again”, and “Not too fast”.

In Hooke’s presentation is clearly shown that at the time no such scheme had been put into practice, but he was extremely optimistic about the outcome of his system:
…with a little practice thereof, all things may be made so convenient, that the same character may be seen at Paris, within a minute after it hath been exposed at London, and the like in proportion for greater distances; and that the characters may be exposed so quick after one another, that a composer shall not exceed the exposer in swiftness.

Robert Hooke had other contributions to the area of computing, communications, and human intellect, which have to be mentioned. The first of them is directly connected to the calculator (Stepped Reckoner) of Gottfried Leibniz.

In fact, Robert Hooke was famous not only as a genius scientist and inventor, but being fiercely competitive, he was remembered also for his brutal disputes (not always within the boundaries of fair debate) with his rivals, as between them were some of the greatest minds of his time (and of the whole human history), like Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton, and as we will see shortly, Gottfried Leibniz.

Leibniz traveled from Paris to London in January 1673, not only with a diplomatic mission but also on invitation by the Royal Society and its secretary Henry Oldenburg, an old correspondent and supporter of him. On 2 February 1673, Leibniz demonstrated his calculating machine to the Society. During the demonstration, Hooke looked carefully at all sides of the machine, and not only examined it in detail but also expressed a desire to take it apart completely to examine its insides 🙂 Moreover, only several days after the demonstration, on 5 February 1673, Hooke attacked Leibniz in public (at the same meeting, Hooke attacked also Newton, so it seems he had just an attacking day 🙂 making derogatory comments about the machine and promised to construct his own superior and better working calculating machine, which he would present to the society.

Speaking about Leibniz’s calculating machine, Hooke declared that it seems to me so complicated with wheels, pinions, cantrights, springs, screws, stops, and truckles, that I could not perceive it ever to be of any great use… It could be only fit for great persons to purchase, and for great force to remove and manage, and for great wits to understand and comprehend. In contrast, Hooke announced that I have an instrument now making, which will perform the same effects [and] will not have a tenth part of the number of parts, and not take up a twentieth part of the room.

It seems Hooke kept his word, because there is a record from 5 March 1673, claiming that he produced the arithmetical engine, mentioned by him in the meeting of 5 February, and showed the manner in large numbers, for multiplication or division, one may be able to do more than twenty by the common way of working arithmetic. Unfortunately, Hooke’s calculating machine remained as sparsely documented, as his spring-powered model representing one of about thirty different envisioned species of flying machines. The machine was listed among the artificial rarities in the collection of Gresham College in 1681 but then disappeared, leaving no traces behind. It is possible that Hooke’s machine was based upon the design of Samuel Morland because it was said, that he made it in a matter only of a few days. Another very interesting fact is that only a couple of days before the demonstration of Leibniz on 2 February 1673, on 31 January 1673, Hooke wrote in his diary that he Saw Sir S. Morland’s Arithmetic engine Very Silly. It seems, however, that the machines of Morland were not that silly 🙂 and Hooke borrowed some ideas from the multiplication machine of Morland. On 20 March Hooke recorded that Mr Stanton shewd me his module of Arithmetick engine. This was presumably the model of Hooke’s design that he had requested earlier in the month from Edward Stanton, a highly regarded London clockmaker.

Interestingly, Hooke also speculated on the physical operation of the human mind, although he didn’t go as far as Thomas Hobbes in assigning a material existence to the soul. The operation of the mind Hooke imagined in the form of a coiled spring: There is as it were a continued chain of ideas coyled up in the repository of the brain, the first end of which is farthest removed from the center or seat of the soul where ideas are formed, which is always the moment present when considered; And therefore according as there are a greater number of [layers of] these ideas between the present sensation or thought in the center, and any other, the more is the soul apprehensive of the time interposed.

To evaluate the storage capacity of the human brain, Hooke calculated the number of thoughts that could be registered per second, hour, day, year, and lifetime, and took a round sum but 21 hundred million 🙂

The first widely adopted system for transmitting messages overland and the first practical telecommunications system of the industrial age was developed around 1790 in France by Claude Chappe and his four brothers (Claude was one of eight brothers, but three of them died in infancy, so five survived: Ignace (1762-1829), Claude (1763-1805), Pierre (1765-1834), René (1769-1854), and Abraham (1773-1849).

Claude Chappe was a person of noble descent (he was the grandson of a French baron), who after completing his studies at the Royal College in La Flèche, was appointed commendatory abbot, a sinecure that provided him with enough money to create a small laboratory, where he performed many experiments in physics. Chappe lost his position during the French Revolution and in 1789 returned to his birthplace. Claude’s brothers had also lost their jobs and returned to Brûlon.

In early 1790 the five Chappe brothers decided to set up a shop to work on visual telegraph (initially the device was called tachygraphe), using a telescope. The use of the telescope in visual telegraphy had already been proposed by Robert Hooke over a century earlier, and later used by other inventors, like the French physicist Guillaume Amontons (1663–1705), who in 1690 demonstrated his system of telegraphy before the Dauphin in the garden of Luxembourg in Paris.

Chappe brothers spent the winter of 1790-1791 experimenting with various designs. The telegraph used in their first experiments was described by the Chappe as a pendulum system, referenced also as a synchronized system. For the first experiments, two devices were used, possibly just two modified synchronized pendulum clocks. The initial experiments were held over distances up to 400 meters, behind the Chappe’s parental house in Brûlon. Let’s see a description of the first system, given by Ignace Chappe:
The first telegraphic correspondence that we performed was done with two pendulum clocks, that were kept in perfect synchrony; the face of the clocks was divided into ten parts, each part designating a different number. When the pointer of one clock passed over the number one wanted to indicate, a sound was made, announcing to the correspondent that the number which also his pointer indicated at the moment that the sound was heard, was significant. By representing the words in a dictionary with successive numbers one could thus transmit any thought.

At this short distance, the sound signals could still easily be heard, but it was clear also at that time that it would eventually have to be replaced if longer distances had to be covered. Abraham Chappe later wrote that Claude performed many experiments to find a good alternative, including the use of electrical signals through wires (the idea for communication, based on static electricity, was abandoned because of the difficulties of insulation), and records that an optical method was only chosen (with black and white surfaces) …after having tried, unsuccessfully, electricity, various acoustical methods, the use of smoke produced by different types of combustible materials, etc.

The first public demonstration was done on 2 March 1791. One of the devices was placed on a terrace at the former location of the castle in Brûlon (see the lower drawing), and the other at the window of a house in Parcé, a small town at a distance some 16 km from Brûlon. In the nearby picture, you can see an illustration of the first demonstration in a book from 1868—”Les Merveilles de la science ou description populaire des inventions modernes. Télégraphie aérienne, électrique et sous-marine, câble transatlantique, galvanoplastie, dorure et argenture électro-chimiques, aérostats, éthérisation”, author Louis Figuier.

In the official report (affidavit) from the presentation in Parcé is specified:
At the invitation of Mr. Claude Chappe, we have gone to the house of Mr. Ambroise Perrotin, in the aforementioned city of Parcé, to observe the result of an invention intended to communicate and correspond in the shortest amount of time.
First, we were led into a room of the said house, by the said Mr. Claude Chappe, and we found there a pendulum clock, and a telescope pointing in the direction of Brûlon, 4 leagues distant from Parcé.
Next, the said Mr. Claude Chappe aimed the telescope directly at Brûlon, announcing that even though the weather was rainy, his correspondent at Brûlon would proceed by initiating a transmission that would be dictated to him by the municipal officers at that site; and while continuously keeping his eye at the telescope, he successively, within the space of four minutes, dictated to Mr. Pierre Francois Chappe, his brother, various characters, unknown to us. By translating these characters, the following phrase was produced: Si vous réussissez vous serez bientôt couvert de gloire [If you succeed you will soon bask in glory].
Done and attested to in Parcé, at the house of the said Mr. Perrotin, before midday, at said day and year.

In the report from the presentation in Brûlon is specified:
First, we went with Mr. René Chappe, brother of Mr. Claude Chappe, to the terrace at the castle, and there we found a pendulum clock and a movable tableau, with two sides, one being white and one black.
Next, Mr. René Chappe informed us that Mr. Claude Chappe was at that time at Parcé, at a distance from Brûlon of 4 leagues, to receive what he was about to transmit. He asked us to dictate a phrase to him, or any series of phrases of our choosing. In response, Mr. Chenou, doctor, proposed the following phrase: Si vous réussissez vous serez bientôt couvert de gloire. Immediately, said Mr. René Chappe, after pointing out to us that the weather was rainy, and that the atmosphere was obscured by a light mist, contemplated said phrase, and proceeded to transmit it while moving the tableau in various ways, which lasted four minutes. He then told us that the said phrase had actually been transmitted to Parcé; as an inspection of the notary report, drafted by the municipal officers at that location would demonstrate.

After the successful demonstration, the hard road to success really began for the Chappe brothers in their attempt to secure government funding for the construction of a telegraph network. Luckily, Ignace Chappe was elected to the new Legislative Assembly in Paris. He became a Deputy to the Assembly in October 1791, and a member of the Committee for Public Instruction, which had an important advisory role in the consideration of new inventions.

Thus with help from his brother, Claude obtained permission to address the Assembly in Paris on 24 March 1792 to explain his plan. The text of his address was:
I have come to offer to the National Assembly the tribute of a discovery that I believe to be useful to the public cause. This discovery provides a simple method for rapidly communicating over great distances, anything that could be the subject of correspondence. The report of an event or an occurrence could be transmitted, by night or by day, over more than 40 miles in under 46 minutes. This transmission takes place almost as rapidly over a much larger distance (the time required for the communication does not increase proportionally with the distance). I can, in 20 minutes, transmit over a distance of 8 to 10 miles, the following, or any other similar phrase: “Lukner has left for Mons to besiege that city. Bender is advancing for its defense. The two generals are present. Tomorrow the battle will start.” These same phrases are communicated in 24 minutes over a distance twice that of before; in 33 minutes they cover 50 miles. The transmission over a distance of 100 miles requires just 12 minutes more. Among the many useful applications for which this discovery can be used, there is one that, under the present circumstances, is of the greatest importance. It offers a reliable way of establishing a correspondence by which the legislative branch of the government could send its orders to our frontiers, and receive a response from there while still in session.
My assertions are not just based on a simple theory. Many successful experiments, held at a distance of 10 miles, in the Sarthe department, are for me a certain guarantee that this can be accomplished. The attached affidavits, drawn up at two municipalities, in the presence of a range of witnesses, attest to its authenticity. The obstacle that seems to me to be the most difficult to overcome is the popular suspicion that usually confronts those who pursue projects such as these. I could never have escaped from the fear that has overtaken them, if I was not sustained by the conviction that I should, as every French citizen, today more than ever, contribute to his country what he can.
I ask, Sirs, that the Assembly submit to one of its committees the examination of this project that I have the honor to announce to you so that they can appoint delegates to observe the results of an experiment readily performed at a distance of 8 to 10 miles, and convince themselves that the same can be accomplished at any distance. I will perform this experiment, and in addition, at any distance that is requested, and I ask only, in case of success, to be reimbursed for the expenses that are made.

Not satisfied with the experiments of the pendulum system, in the summer of 1792 Claude Chappe started experimenting with a different design. It included a rectangular wooden frame with 5 sliding panels that could be displayed or obscured individually with pulleys. The five panels produced a five-bit binary code (with 32 possible combinations), more than three times as many codes as used in the first design.

In September 1792 Chappe was ready to perform a demonstration to the Assembly. Unfortunately, the Legislative Assembly was disbanded that month, and replaced with a National Convention. Ignace Chappe was not re-elected to the new body, so part of Claude’s influence was lost in the transition, but he kept sending proposals and letters to the Convention.

At the beginning of 1793, Claude Chappe concluded that the panel telegraph had been a false start, and he changed designs once more. As Ignace noted:
Some time later we established with certainty that elongated objects were better visible than the sliding panels adopted before.

The third design of Chappe, the so-called semaphore (a word derived by Chappe from the Greek for “bearing a sign”) telegraph, consisted of a large horizontal beam (regulator), with two smaller wings (indicators), mounted at the ends (just like a person with wide-outstretched arms, holding a signal flag in each hand). The angles of the indicators, and independently also the position of the large regulator beam, could be varied in increments of 45 degrees, sufficient for the encoding of hundreds of symbols.

Luckily, Chappe had found a few allies in the legislative bodies, and on 12 July 1893, a successful official test was held. Three locations that had been selected, were: Belleville, the heights of Ecouen at 15 km north of Belleville, and the town of Saint-Martin-du-Tertre, another 11 km further north. Within 11 minutes the message was transmitted, from Belleville, through Ecouen, to Saint-Martin-du-Tertre, the answer arrived 9 minutes later.

From this moment, things moved very quickly. On 26 July 1793, the decision was made to establish a French state telegraph. On 4 August 1793, the Convention approved 58400 francs for the construction of a first line of 15 stations from Paris to Lille, some 190 km north of Paris. On 24 September 1793, the Convention gave blanket permission to the Chappes to place telegraphs in any belfries, towers, or emplacements of their choosing. They also had permission to remove any trees that interfered with the line of vision between the stations.

Claude Chappe was given the title of Ingénieur Télégraphe, a salary of 600 francs per month, and the task of construction and maintenance of the later Telegraph Administration. Permission was also granted for him to hire personnel, and to draft the first rules and regulations for the French telegraph. At Claude’s request, his brothers Ignace, Abraham, and Pierre Francois were appointed as administrators of the line to Lille, at 500 francs per month each.

In the revolutionary atmosphere that prevailed in France at this period, it is not surprising that Chappe’s conspicuous experiments earned him the suspicion of the fanatical crowds, and on two occasions the apparatus which he had set up at the Etoile was torn down and destroyed.

Despite all, in July 1794, less than one year after the decision of the Convention, the connection between Paris and Lille was opened. In August the first official message passed along this line from Lille to Paris, reporting the recapture of the city of LeQuesnoy from the Austrians and Prussians. The message arrived in Paris within a few hours after the battle had taken place, and the officials were impressed. The reputation of both the optical telegraph and its creator was firmly established, and the future of the French telegraph network was guaranteed. In October 1794 a decision was made to build a second line, to connect Paris to Landau via Metz and Strasbourg.

Despite the success, Chappe was not satisfied with the performance of the semaphore telegraph. The time to transmit messages was longer than he had expected, and the relatively poor visibility of the stations caused too many transmission errors. Several ways were considered to avoid the problems. First, Claude decided to have extra stations built along the line, to be included in the transmission chain when visibility was low. Second, he proposed to enlarge the regulator from roughly 4 meters to close to 15 meters to improve its visibility. Third, he considered the recommendation of the French mathematician Gaspard Monge for increasing the number of arms from 2 to 7, to increase the code space and hence the speed of transmission. However, Claude finally came to the conclusion that the problem with the semaphore telegraph was not its size or the number of indicators, but an inadequate signaling code. Thus, between 1794 and 1795 he developed a new coding system that alleviated much of the problem.

Despite the numerous obstacles, the beginnings of a network became visible around 1800. Telegraph stations were built roughly 10 km apart. A telegrapher in the next tower would read the semaphore signals through a telescope and retransmit the encrypted message to the following tower. Initially, the average speed of the transmission was 2 to 3 symbols per minute, but sometimes much better speed was achieved, e.g. from Paris to Lille (22 stations), they could receive communications in two minutes. Certainly, the speed depends on the reliability of message transmissions, i.e. from weather conditions, e.g. messages would get through on the first try an average of 97% in August, but only 16% in December.

To simplify the administration and reliability, each line was divided into short, autonomous segments called divisions. At the start and end of every division, all messages were to be completely decoded and recorded in logbooks by an inspector, before being passed on. The operators at intermediate stations were allowed to know only a small subset of the telegraph code: the control codes that preceded and followed the actual messages, and the occasional error codes that could be inserted into them. They did not know the code used for enciphering the actual messages. That authority rested solely with the inspectors of the lines, and the director and assistant directors of the Telegraph Administration.

Sadly, Claude Chappe did not live long enough, to enjoy the (more or less) successful implementation of his plans, as on 23 January 1805, he killed himself. He was said to be depressed by illness, and his natural tendency to melancholia was apparently deepened by the claims by rivals that he had plagiarized from their communication systems.

After Claude’s death, his brothers continued working for the Telegraph Administration, with the strong support of the government. As early as 1801 Napoleon commissioned the youngest brother, Abraham Chappe to develop a telegraph that could signal across the English Channel, to facilitate a possible invasion of England. In 1812 Abraham was commissioned again by Napoleon, this time to develop a mobile version of Chappe’s telegraph that could be deployed during the invasion of Russia in that year. His design was still in use in 1853 when the Crimean War took place. The Chappes had achieved a position of power and relative independence in the administration and operation of the telegraph network. When Louis XVIII was restored to the throne in 1814, the three brothers Ignace, Pierre, and Abraham were given the rank of Chevaliers de Légion d ‘Honneur.

Before long, the first documented communication fraud was discovered, on the Paris to Bordeaux line. In 1834 two bankers, the brothers Francois and Joseph Blanc, had bribed the telegraph operators at a station just behind Tours to introduce a specific pattern of errors into the transmissions, to signal the direction in which the stock market was moving in Paris to an accomplice in Bordeaux. The fraud had been in operation for more than two years before it was discovered in 1836.

By the advent of the electric telegraph (1852) the French network of optical telegraphs had grown to 556 telegraph stations, covering some 4800 km (see the nearby map). The network connected 29 of France’s largest cities to Paris.

The most detailed contemporary information on Chappe’s designs is contained in a book by Ignace Chappe, Histoire de la télégraphie, published in 1824 (see the book digitized by Google from the library of the University of Michigan).

Biography of Claude Chappe

Claude Chappe was born on Christmas day (25 December) 1763, in the small French town of Brûlon, some 200 km southwest of Paris, to Ignace Chappe d’Auteroche and Marie-Renée de Vernay de Vert. Besides Claude, Ignace and Marie-Renée had ten children (but three of them died in infancy, so remained five boys and two girls): Ignace Urbain Jean (1762-1829), Marie Marthe, Claude’s twin sister (1763-1823), Pierre François Émile (1765-1834), Sophie Françoise (1767-1837), Antoine (1768-1768), René (1769-1854), Thomas (1771-1772), Abraham (1773-1849), and Jacques François (1775-1775).

Amazingly, the parental house of Claude Chappe from the 18th century is still preserved (see the lower postcard from 1900), on Nr. 1 Rue Claude Chappe, in Brûlon, Pays de la Loire, France, so most probably Claude was born in this house on Christmas day of 1763, a couple of hours before his twin sister Marie Marthe. Somewhere in this yard Chappe brothers made the first experiments with the telegraph in 1791.

Claude’s father, Ignace Chappe d’Auteroche was born on 13 March 1724, into the noble family of baron Jean Chappe d’Auteroche (1675-1737), and Madeleine de La Farge (1698-1763), of Mauriac, Auvergne. According to the rules of nobility, the title baron passed to the eldest son of the family, Ignace’s brother Jean-Baptiste (who would play a significant role in the early years of Claude Chappe).

Although not a baron himself, Ignace Chappe was clearly still a man of influence. He worked initially as Avocat en Parlement, then received important appointments like Contrôleur Général du Roi au Département de Laval and Directeur des Domaines du Roi in Rouen. Ignace Chappe married on 18 February 1762, to Marie-Renée De Vernay de Vert in Brûlon. She was born on 16 June 1732 in Brûlon, to Antoine De Vernay, sieur de Vert (1699-1763), and Marie Suard (1704-1768), and died on 4 Jan 1821. It seems Ignace Chappe was a hot-spur all his life because, in 1783 (yet 59 years old), he caught a severe cold after crossing the Seine on his horse to win a bet. He died of the consequences and was buried in Brûlon.

Ignace Chappe’s elder brother (see the nearby image), Abbé (abbot) Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche (23 Mar 1722–1 Aug 1769), was a prominent French astronomer, assistant astronomer at the Royal Observatory and member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. The first book Claude Chappe read in his youth was his uncle’s journal of a 1761 trip, Voyage en Siberie, and later he may also have become familiar with the properties of telescopes. Claude’s brother, Abraham, wrote: Reading this book greatly inspired him, and gave him a taste for the physical sciences. From this point on, all his studies, and even his pastimes, were focused on that subject.

The young Claude was raised for the church and received good religious training. He first attended the College de Joyeuse in Rouen, then he moved to Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand in La Flèche (the great René Descartes graduated from this college in 1616). When Claude graduated from the college in 1783, he became an Abbe Commendataire and obtained two religious benefices, close to Paris—Saint-Martin de Châlautre and Baignolet, which provided him with few obligations and ample funds, which he used to create a small home laboratory. One can ask—”Why does a humble cleric need a lab”?

The fact is that Claude showed a strong interest in science, not only as a child (there is a story, that one day at school he constructed a simple system for signaling messages with a pole and a ruler, which his brothers were able to see from home through a telescope), but also during his studies at the college. In his laboratory, Claude performed many experiments in physics (mainly in electricity), and published the results in several papers for the Journal de Physique, some written jointly with other physicists. He became acquainted with a group of physicists in Paris, and later in 1792 joined the prestigious scientific society Société Philomatique.

When in July 1789 the French Revolution began, the rules of life changed in no time. A range of traditional privileges held by the nobility and the religious orders was abolished by a new Legislative Assembly. Claude Chappe lost his religious benefices and in early November 1789, he returned to Brûlon newly unemployed. In the turmoil of the revolution, his brothers had also lost their jobs and returned to Brûlon (Ignace and Pierre-Francois worked as tax collectors, René was Receveurdes Domaines du Roi in Lassay, Abraham was, like Claude, raised for the church, and just graduating, he was still looking for his first assignment). Together the five brothers decided to set up a shop to work on telegraph.

After the implementation of their telegraph, around 1800 Chappe brothers were at the peak of their success. Between 1800 and 1804, however, Claude Chappe became increasingly despondent. He was especially upset when other inventors started attacking his designs, claiming credit for having invented the telegraph earlier.

Towards the end of 1804, Claude Chappe fell ill during a routine inspection tour of some of the new telegraph lines (he was the head of the French Telegraph Administration) that were under construction. He suspected food poisoning and pointed an accusing finger at his adversaries. When he returned to Paris after a sickness of several months (he was tortured by cancer in the ear), he sank into a depression from which he didn’t manage to recover. On Wednesday 23 January 1805, Claude Chappe committed suicide by jumping into a well in the yard of the Telegraph Administration at l’Hôtel Villeroy in Paris. He was aged only forty-one years.

In 1893, at the first centennial of the telegraph, a bronze monument of Claude Chappe was erected in Paris (see the nearby image), at the crossroad of boulevards Raspail and Saint-Germain, near the Rue du Bac, where Chappe had his first workshop. It was demolished and melted down for ammunition in 1942, during the Nazi occupation.

The first widely adopted device to encode letters, numbers, and symbols as uniform-length binary sequences was the multiplexed printing telegraph, created in the early 1870s by the French inventor Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot. The Baudot’s telegraph revolutionized communications and made his name synonymous with rapid telegraphy. The baud unit of transmission speed was named after Baudot. Baudot’s clever system of recording data in a perforated tape with one 5-bit channel per character resulted in a recording mechanism that the early computers easily adopted. When the computers of the fifties and sixties needed input/output media (apart from punched cards), the Baudot teleprinters and readers had become fast enough by that time to be a viable alternative.

Baudot was born in Magneux, Haute-Marne, France, the son of a farmer. His only formal education was at his local primary school, after which he carried out agricultural work on his father’s farm before joining the French Post & Telegraph Administration as an apprentice operator in 1869. The telegraph service trained him in the Morse telegraph and also sent him on a four-month course of instruction on the Hughes printing telegraph system, which was later to inspire his own system. The printing telegraph of British-American inventor David Edward Hughes was the top technology in telegraphy at the moment, but it only achieved speeds of about a dozen words per minute, so Baudot decided to improve it (at the end he was able to almost triple the communication speed).

In 1872, after a service at the French Army, Baudot returned to the Telegraph Service at the central Post Paris and was encouraged to develop (on his own time), a system for time-multiplexing several telegraph messages. He realized that in the printing telegraphs of the time the line is idle for most of the time, apart from the brief intervals when a character is transmitted. To produce a complete multiplex system Baudot combined, along with his original ideas, the printing mechanism from Hughes’ telegraph (British patent in 1855), the distributor invented by the French telegraph operator Bernhard Meyer (1830-1884) in the late 1860s (Meyer was also the first to produce a multiplexer, capable of sending four telegraph signals simultaneously over the same line, and the first to use perforated tape for the retransmission of Morse signals), and the five-unit code devised by Gauss and Weber in 1833.

Baudot devised one of the first applications of time-division multiplexing in communications. Using synchronized clockwork-powered switches at the transmitting and receiving ends, he was able to transmit five messages simultaneously and, as the transmissions were received, would print them in ordinary alphabetic characters on a strip of paper. The system was officially adopted by the French Post & Telegraph Administration five years later.

In fact, Baudot’s early telegraph used a six-unit code (see the nearby figure). Instead of a variable delay followed by a single-unit pulse, like in Hughes’ telegraph, Baudot used uniform six-time units to transmit 26 letters of Latin.

Baudot received a French patent for his invention (Un système de télégraphe rapide) on 17 June 1874 (Brevet Nr. 130898). Later he received patents in several other countries, including the USA (see patent Nr. US388244).

In the figure, each printable character is shown next to the pattern of impulses that is transmitted on a telegraph line to represent it. Dots specifically represent the positive voltage of an idle telegraph line, while circles are the negative voltage of an active line. In related systems using punched paper tape, circles represent a hole punched in the tape and dots the absence of a hole.

A six-unit code can encode 64 (26) different symbols, far more than the twenty-six letters of Latin. This smaller set of characters can be encoded more efficiently with a five-unit code, which allows 32 (25) combinations, so in 1876 Baudot redesigned his equipment to use a five-unit code. Punctuation and digits were still sometimes needed, though, so he adopted from Hughes the use of two special letter space and figure space characters that would cause the printer to shift between cases at the same time as it advanced the paper without printing.

Baudot’s hardware had three main parts: the keyboard, the distributor, and a paper tape character printing receiver. The five-unit code of Baudot was structured to suit his keyboard, which controlled two units of each character with switches operated by the left hand and the other three units with the right hand.

Each operator (there were as many as six) was allocated a single sector of the distributor. Once the keys had been pressed they were locked down until the contacts again passed over the sector connected to that particular keyboard, when the keyboard was unlocked ready for the next character to be entered, with an audible click (cadence signal) to warn the operator. Each keyboard was connected to a set of rotors that opened and closed contacts on the conductive elements fixed called segments. The brushes rotated thanks to an electric motor or a mechanism weights. Accurate operation of the system depended on the distributor at the transmitting end keeping in synchronization with the one at the receiving end, as operators are only sending characters when the contacts pass over their allocated sector. This could be achieved at a speed of 30 words per minute by strictly observing the “cadence” of the rhythm of the system when the distributor gave the operator the use of the line.

The receiver was also connected to the distributor. The signals from the telegraph line were temporarily stored on a buffer (set of five electromagnets), before being decoded to print the corresponding character on paper tape.

The system of Baudot was accepted by the French Telegraph Administration in 1875, with the first tests of his system occurring between Paris and Bordeaux on 12 November 1877. At the end of 1877, the Paris-Rome line, which was some 1700 kilometers, began operating a duplex Baudot system.

The Baudot apparatus was shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878 and won the Exposition’s gold medal, as well as bringing his system to worldwide notice. Soon the Baudot telegraph system was employed progressively in France, and then was adopted in other countries: Italy in 1887, the Netherlands in 1895, Switzerland in 1896, then Brazil and Austria in 1897. The British Post Office adopted it in 1897, Germany in 1900, Russia in 1904, Spain in 1906, Belgium in 1909, Argentina in 1912, Romania in 1913, etc. In France the last Baudot telegraphs were withdrawn in 1958.

Biography of Emile Baudot

Jean Maurice Émile Baudot was born on 11 September 1845, in Magneux, a village in the department of Haute-Marne, in eastern France. He was the firstborn of Pierre Emile Baudot (8 June 1822–21 February 1895), a shoemaker and the owner of a farm (later in 1890 he became the mayor of Magneux), and Marie Irma Couchot (7 April 1826–10 March 1895), a dressmaker (they married on 30 December 1844). Pierre Emile Baudot was the son of the local landowner Jean Maurice Baudot (1779-1850), and Marie Geneviève Lepaux (1778-1859). Marie Irma Couchot was the daughter of Louis Cochot (1792-1865), a weaver, and Marie Anne Regnaux (1793-1828).

The Baudot family was well-off, but Émile didn’t have a careless childhood. As a boy, he attended the local primary school and used to work at his father’s farm right after, a job he did not particularly like.

After the start of his professional career in the administration of French Post & Telegraph at Chaumont in 1869, the next year Baudot moved to Paris where on 16 July 1870 he was appointed a fifth-class employee at the Central Télégraphique de Paris, a bit later at the Bordeaux Station. The telegraph service trained him in the Morse telegraph and also sent him on a four-month course of instruction on the Hughes printing telegraph system, which was later to inspire his own system. But the Franco-Prussian war broke out in July 1870 and Baudot was appointed to a division of the “Télégraphie Militaire” in January 1871. He ended the war as a lieutenant and was transferred to Paris where he resumed his duties in February 1872.

Initially, Baudot received little help from the French Telegraph Administration for his system and often had to fund his own research, even having to sell the gold medal awarded by the 1878 Exposition Universelle. But thanks to his endeavor and study work (mainly after his working hours) and the success of his system at that time he could be promoted to Controller (co-director) in 1880. Then he had the ambition to become an engineer. He prepared for the exam, successfully passed it, and was appointed Inspector-engineer in 1882. After the first success of his system, Baudot was awarded Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1879 (later in 1898 he was awarded Officier de la Légion d’Honneur), and got several orders from the governments of Austria, Belgium, and Italy.

Emile Baudot married late, on 15 January 1890, in Bar-le-Duc (a small town in northeastern France, not far from his birthplace) to the young Marie Josephine Adelaide Langrognet (born 4 April 1864), the daughter of a local academy inspector. Unfortunately, she died less than three months later, on 9 April 1890.

Emile Baudot suffered from poor health most of his life. Soon after starting work with the telegraph service, he began to suffer physical discomfort and was frequently absent from work for this reason, for as long as a month on one occasion. Directeur des services électriques pour la région de Paris—Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot died of fatigue on 28 March 1903, at Sceaux, near Paris, at the age of 57.

Edward “Ed” Fredkin (1934–2023) was an American physicist, pilot, programmer, engineer, hardware designer, and businessman, whose work inside and outside academia has influenced major developments in computer science and in the foundation of theoretical physics for the past 50 years.

Although Fredkin’s initial focus was physics, he became involved with computers early in his life, in 1956 when he was sent by the Air Force, where he had trained as a jet pilot, to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked on the SAGE computer. On completing his service in 1958, Ed was hired by Joseph Licklider to work at the research company Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN). After seeing the PDP-1 computer prototype at the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston, in December 1959, Fredkin recommended that BBN purchase the very first PDP-1 to support research projects. The new hardware was initially delivered with no software whatsoever, so Fredkin wrote a PDP-1 assembler language called FRAP (Free of Rules Assembly Program), and its first operating system (OS). He organized and founded the Digital Equipment Computer Users’ Society (DECUS) in 1961, and participated in its early projects. Working directly with Ben Gurley, the designer of the PDP-1, Ed designed significant modifications to the hardware to support time-sharing via the BBN Time-Sharing System. He invented and designed the first modern interrupt system, which Digital called the “Sequence Break”. He went on to become a contributor in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In 1962, Fredkin founded Information International, Inc., an early computer technology company that developed high-precision digital-to-film scanners, as well as other leading-edge hardware. In 1968, he returned to academia, starting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a full professor despite the fact that he had never graduated from college. From 1971 to 1974, Fredkin was the Director of Project MAC at MIT. He spent a year at Caltech as a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, working with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, and was a Professor of Physics at Boston University for six years.

Fredkin was broadly interested in computation, including hardware and software. He was the inventor of the trie data structure, radio transponders for vehicle identification, the concept of computer navigation for automobiles, the Fredkin gate, and the Billiard-Ball Computer Model for reversible computing. He has also been involved in computer vision, chess, and other areas of Artificial Intelligence research.

Fredkin’s career and achievements had much of their motivation in digital philosophy, a particular type of pancomputationalism (pancomputationalists believe that biology reduces to chemistry which reduces to physics which reduces to the computation of information). His digital philosophy contains several fundamental ideas:
• Everything in physics and physical reality must have a digital informational representation.
• All changes in physical nature are consequences of digital informational processes.
• Nature is finite and digital.
• The traditional Judaeo-Christian concept of the soul has a counterpart in a static/dynamic soul defined in terms of digital philosophy.

Fredkin formulated also a paradox in philosophy (related to Buridan’s ass paradox), which concerns the negative correlation between the difference between two options and the difficulty of deciding between them. It reads: “The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them—no matter that, to the same degree, the choice can only matter less.” Thus, a decision-making agent might spend the most time on the least important decisions. Developed further, the paradox constitutes a major challenge to the possibility of pure instrumental rationality.

Biography of Edward Fredkin

Edward “Ed” Fredkin was born on 2 October 1934 in Los Angeles, California. He was the youngest child of four (Hedda (Ed’s mother’s daughter by a previous marriage), Norman J. (b. 1928), Joan M. (b. 1933), and Ed) of Manuel S. Fredkin (24 Mar 1900-25 Apr 1988) and Rose Jacob (Spiegel) Fredkin (14 Sep 1898-22 Jun 1946). Manuel and Rose were Russian Jews (Manuel was born in S. Petersburg, while Rose was from Odessa), who emigrated to the USA in the early 1920s, met in Los Angeles, and married in 1927.

Rose was a concert pianist, although she did not perform professionally. She died from cancer when Ed was 11. Manuel was a businessperson but had lost everything in the 1929 stock market crash, and as a result, the family was relatively poor. At times Ed lived with other related families or with his eldest sister Hedda. Eventually, his father remarried (to Elsie Gabel), and he and his sister moved back in. As a child, Ed was both entrepreneurial and interested in science and how things work. He did various weekend and after-school things to earn money, eventually handling a large newspaper delivery route. At age 10 he bought chemistry supplies and made his own fireworks, which were then illegal in Los Angeles. Ed did poorly in school because he didn’t do homework.

In 1952 Ed graduated from John Marshall High School a semester early so that he could earn money for Caltech tuition and living expenses. Caltech later told him he had been admitted with the worst high school grades they had ever seen. He quit University partway through his sophomore year to enlist in the Air Force (his brother Norman was an Air Force pilot). Ed trained as a fighter pilot, but the military found his technical skills impossible to ignore and detailed him to the Lincoln Laboratory, a Pentagon-funded innovation hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1968, Fredkin joined the faculty at MIT as a full professor, an unheard-of leap in academia for someone without a bachelor’s degree. During his tenure there, he headed Project MAC, a research initiative that made advances in multiple-access computers, operating systems, and an AI precursor known as machine-aided cognition.

Fredkin was married twice. In 1957, while a lieutenant in the Army, he married Dorothy L. Abair, and they had three children—Susan, Sally, and Michael. In 1980 he married Joycelin Fredkin, and they had a son, Richard.

The undereducated genius, self-made millionaire, and self-made intellectual Ed Fredkin died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on 13 June 2023, at the age of 88.

In the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine the American writer Isaac Asimov introduced The Three Laws of Robotics in his short story “Runaround” (see the story). The Three Laws are:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The story was written in October 1941 and featured Asimov’s recurring characters Powell and Donovan, as well as the Robot SPD-13, also known as “Speedy”. As in many of his Robot stories, Asimov used conflicts in the application of the Three Laws of Robotics as the subject of the plot. The robot finds it impossible to obey both the Second Law and the Third Law at the same time, and this freezes it in a loop of repetitive behavior.

Asimov was very optimistic about the future of humanity, and in his plot in 2015, Powell, Donovan, and Speedy are sent to Mercury to restart operations at a mining station that was abandoned ten years before. They discover that the photo-cell banks that provide life support to the base are short on selenium and will soon fail. The nearest selenium pool is some 27 km away, and since Speedy can withstand Mercury’s high temperatures, Donovan sends him to get it. Powell and Donovan become worried when they realize that Speedy has not returned after five hours. They sent a more primitive robot to find Speedy and try to analyze what happened to it.

As the order to retrieve the selenium was casually worded with no particular emphasis, Speedy cannot decide whether to obey it, following the Second Law, or protect himself from danger, following the strengthened Third Law. He then oscillates between positions: farther from the selenium pool, in which the order outweighs the need for self-preservation, and nearer the pool, in which the compulsion of the third law is bigger and pushes him back. The conflicting Laws cause what is basically a feedback loop which confuses him to oscillate around the point where the two compulsions are of equal strength, which makes the robot appear inebriated.

Under the Second Law Speedy should obey Powell’s order to return to base, but that fails, as the conflicted positronic brain cannot accept new orders. An attempt to increase the compulsion of the Third Law fails. They place an acid, which can destroy Speedy, in his path, but it merely causes the robot to change his route until he finds a new equilibrium between the avoid-danger law and the follow-order law.

When they eventually find Speedy, they discover he is running in a huge circle around a selenium pool. Further, they notice that “Speedy’s gait [includes] a peculiar rolling stagger, a noticeable side-to-side lurch”. When the robot is asked to return with the selenium, he begins talking oddly, showing symptoms that, if he were human, would be interpreted as drunkenness. Powell eventually realizes that the selenium source contains unforeseen danger to the robot. Under normal circumstances, Speedy would observe the Second Law, but because he was so expensive to manufacture, and “not a thing to be lightly destroyed”, the Third Law had been strengthened “so that his allergy to danger is unusually high”. The only thing that trumps both the Second Law and Third Law is the First Law of Robotics. Therefore, Powell decides to risk his own life by going out in the heat, hoping that the First Law will force Speedy to overcome his cognitive dissonance to save Powell’s life. The plan works, and the team was able to repair the photocell banks.

The original laws have been altered and elaborated on by Asimov and other authors. Asimov himself made slight modifications to the first three in various books and short stories to further develop how robots would interact with humans and each other. In later fiction where robots had taken responsibility for the government of whole planets and human civilizations, Asimov also added a fourth, or zeroth law, to precede the others:
0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

On 1 July 1981, with a capital of only 6000 USD, the Singapore engineer Sim Wong Hoo, together with his childhood friend and polytechnic schoolmate Ng Kai Wa, opened a computer repair shop in Pearl’s Centre, in Chinatown, and founded Creative Technology.

Creative started by developing and selling an add-on memory board for the Apple II computer but subsequently began creating customized PCs adapted for the Chinese language, including enhanced audio capabilities that allowed the devices to produce speech and melodies. Sim envisioned building a personal computer that could talk, sing, and play music, besides crunching numbers, and this came about from his days as a member of the Ngee Ann Harmonica Troupe. In 1988, Creative established an office in the United States and began selling Sound Blaster, a stand-alone sound card. It was among the first dedicated audio processing cards widely available to general consumers.

The enormous success of Sound Blaster helped grow Creative’s revenue from US$5.4 million in 1989 to US$658 million in 1994. By 2000, at the age of 45, Sim became Singapore’s youngest billionaire. Creative Technology dominated the PC audio market until the 2000s when OEM PCs began to be built with integrated sound boards in the motherboard.

Creative had also gone to war with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs over their companies’ portable music players (Creative launched its Nomad MP3 player in 1999, two years before Apple unveiled the iPod). They sued the iPod maker in 2006 for patent infringements and walked away with a US$100 million settlement.

Biography of Sim Wong Hoo

Sim Wong Hoo was born on 28 April 1955 in a kampung (village), called End of Coconut Hill in Bukit Panjang, Western Singapore. He was the 10^th child in a Zhao’an Hokkien family of 12 (five boys and seven girls). His father, Sim Chye Thiam, worked as a laborer in a factory and later as a provision shop attendant. To supplement the household income, Sim’s mother, Tan Siok Kee (1909-2006), reared chickens, ducks, pigs, and rabbits, grew fruits and herbs, and sold eggs from door to door. Sim’s father passed away in 1969 when Sim was 13, leaving Tan to raise the family. From a young age, in addition to doing chores at home and on the farm, Sim would also sell eggs at the market before school. Unable to afford toys, Sim enjoyed creating his own games and playing the harmonica, a hobby that he picked up at age 11 and regarded as his first love.

Sim attended Bukit Panjang Government High School, before graduating in 1975 from Ngee Ann Technical College, where he read electrical and electronic engineering. In college, Sim joined the harmonica troupe and found his creative outlet arranging musical scores. To provide accompaniment for their performances, Sim joined the Practice Theatre School run by playwright Kuo Pao Kun and learned to play the accordion. After graduation, Sim served his mandatory National Service for two years, then worked in the private engineering sector for a year, and opened a tuition center offering computer classes,  before establishing his own company, the remarkable Creative Technology in the summer of 1981. Creative’s Sound Blaster card, launched in 1989, was a game changer in allowing PCs to generate quality sound. It had sold 400 million units as of 2019. The company still exists today, although on a smaller scale.

One of Sim’s most significant achievements was coining and popularising the term “No U-Turn Syndrome” (NUTS) in his 1999 book, “Chaotic Thoughts from the Old Millennium”. NUTS is a term used to describe the social behavior of Singaporeans, who have the propensity to ask authorities for permission before proceeding with any actions. Sim used the analogy of the traffic rules of Singapore, where drivers are not allowed to make a U-turn, unless a sign explicitly states so, to describe this behavior. He compared it to other countries where drivers may make U-turns freely, as long as there is no “no U-turn” sign, and used this analogy to explain the red tape that he encountered when dealing with bureaucrats—a phenomenon that he felt stifled the creativity of Singaporeans, which the government has been trying to promote. NUTS is also a criticism of the strict education system in Singapore, where students are taught from a young age to obey instructions without questioning decisions.

Sim advised budding entrepreneurs not to get married—”Once you have family and commitment, you cannot afford to take risks. I can take risks because I have no family. In the early days, I survived on S$200 a month…” He said entrepreneurs need to take risks, or “nothing happens”—”You need to face the consequences of your mistakes and learn from your mistakes. If you do not make mistakes, you won’t learn anything and you won’t grow up.” Sim himself never married, although some sources claimed, that he had a relationship with one Karen Ngui, and had a daughter.

Interestingly, Sim started running late in his life, in 2007, had completed more than 50 marathons, including at least a dozen ultramarathons, and had credited running for clearing his mind and sparking new ideas, while trimming his weight. Although in his late 60s, he appeared to be in good health, but suddenly, passed away on 4 January 2023, aged 67. An active donor, Sim contributed almost S$50 million to charity during his lifetime.

In 1946, Kathleen Hylda Valerie Britten, a young 24 y. o. BSc in mathematics (1944) from the University of London, joined a team of mathematicians at London’s Birkbeck College who were performing calculations for scientists using X-ray images to determine crystal structures. There she met Andrew Donald Booth (1918-2009), a Ph.D. in crystallography, whom she is going to marry in 1950.

In those days crystallographic research required huge amounts of laborious analysis and calculation with desk calculators, so Booth was sent to the US to learn about developments in computing. He visited many of the computers that were under development in the US, returning to Birkbeck in 1946, where he and Britten collaborated on a very early digital computer, the Automatic Relay Calculator (ARC). Booth designed it, but Kathleen and her fellow research assistant Xenia Sweeting built the hardware.

In 1947 Booth returned to the US together with Britten, for 6 months to take up a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, where John von Neumann explained his concept of what is now called the von Neumann computer architecture. Booth and Britten returned to the UK, where they wrote an interesting article for all purpose computer, and redesigned their ARC calculator based on these ideas, leading to the ARC2 and in the process inventing a drum memory to provide enough storage to hold both program information and data. Building the ARC2 from relays proved too much, so in 1948, Booth and Britten moved on to the Simple Electronic Computer (SEC) and then the All Purpose Electronic X-Ray Computer or APE(X)C.

In 1950, Kathleen and Andrew married, the same year that she got a PhD in applied mathematics, again from the University of London. To secure further funding for their work, the Booths again went to the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided it on condition that the APE(C)X worked with human languages as well as just mathematics. The result was a demonstration of machine translation in November 1955. As well as building the hardware for the first machines, Kathleen wrote all the software for the ARC2 and SEC machines, in the process inventing what she called Contracted Notation. This language, through evolution and contributions by others, is today known as assembly language.

The Booth family moved to Canada in the early 1960s, where Kathleen and Andrew continued working in academia until their retirement in 1978 when the couple founded a computer consulting business on Vancouver Island. They had remarkably long and meaningful life (Andrew died at 91 in 2009, and Kathleen died at 100 in 2022), let’s mention some of their achievements:
• Several early British computers (Andrew)
• Booth’s multiplication algorithm (Andrew)
• An early rotating storage device (Andrew)
• First assembler program, bootstrapping software development up from machine code in binary to simple logical instructions (Kathleen)
• A natural language translation program in the mid-1950s translating from French into English (Kathleen)
• One of the first books on programming: Programming for an Automatic Digital Computer (1958) (Kathleen)
For Booth’s achievements in England, see the interesting material of Roger G. Johnson.