Computer Timeline – Page 28 – Yet another site for bright people, crafted by Georgi Dalakov

01 Apr 1898

Ivar Hultman

In the second half of the 1890s, Ivar Hultman (1869-1942), a Swedish mathematician and inventor, together with his partners—Knut Martin Pauli (an engineer, born 1866 in Jönköping) and Julius Waldemar Haglund (a mechanic, born 1877 in Stockholm), devised a pin-wheel calculating machine and applied for patents in several countries. The..Read More

03 Nov 1898

Mark Twain

The great American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter often called “the Great American Novel”. In 1898 Twain met Jan Szczepanik (1872–1926) (see the image below), a young and very capable..Read More

03 Jan 1899

Henry Goldman

In 1898, in Chicago, USA, was published quite interesting book, a panorama of existing calculating devices, named THE ARITHMACHINIST. A Practical Self Instructor in Mechanical Arithmetic. In its 128 pages the author—one Henry Goldman, an expert bookkeeper with years of experience, not only described briefly the existing state-of-the-art in this..Read More

28 Mar 1899

Joseph Turck

Joseph Abraham Valentine Turck (1870-1956) was a famous figure in the world of mechanical calculators. He is the author of some 40 patents in this area, the first (for adding machine and register) received in 1899 (pat. №US622091), and the last in 1956. Some of his patents are received together..Read More

23 Sep 1899

Adam Hoch

The American engineer Adam Hoch (1856-1926) was a prolific inventor of calculating machines and devices (e.g. adding attachments for type-writing machines) from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. He was a holder of several dozens of patents in this area from the USA, Canada, Germany,..Read More

09 Dec 1899

Georges Lafond

In 1899 the French engineer Georges Lafond from Paris received several patents in different countries for a simple calculating device (Austrian patent №6618, German patent №148810, US patent No. 653250, Great Britain patent №189902195, and Swiss patent №19395). The calculator of Lafond was an interesting watch-like circular adding machine (see..Read More

14 Jun 1900

Nikola Tesla

The great inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was also a great dreamer. In 1893, he started his wireless investigations and several years later he described his futuristic vision: a means of tapping the sun’s energy with an antenna, the possibility to control the weather with electrical energy, outlined machines that would..Read More

30 Nov 1900

Alexander Rechnitzer

Alexander Rechnitzer (1880-1922) is an Austrian Jew, a holder of numerous patents for calculating devices in Austria (4 patents), Germany (10), Switzerland (2), USA (6, see his first US patent), France (4), Great Britain (7), Canada (1), and Sweden (2). Rechnitzer appeared to be an extremely talented mechanic and versatile..Read More

04 Jul 1901

Lyman Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum’s (author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) 1901 illustrated novel, The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale, Founded Upon the Mysteries of Electricity and the Optimism of its Devotees, describes the adventures of a teenage boy named Rob Joslyn (the book was dedicated to his son, Robert..Read More

17 Dec 1901

James Walsh

On 17 December 1901 James J. Walsh (1863-1942) from Elizabeth, New Jersey, took out the US patent No. 689255 for an adding machine, type dial adder, which will become popular later as Calcumeter. This stylus-driven cogged wheel adder (see the nearby image) was manufactured from 1903 until 1905 by the..Read More