Category: Timeline Stories

On 2 February 1864, Emile Grandjean, a French watchmaker (horlogère) from Fumay (Ardennes), received a 15-year patent (see French patent N°61637) for an adding machine, called Additionneur Grandjean. The Scottish pastor Brown’s Rotula Arithmetica from the 1690s can be seen as the archetype of all of these concentric toothed-disk-adding devices. Besides the patent application, nothing is known about Additionneur Grandjean, so most probably it remained only on paper, but its principle was implemented several decades later in quite a few simple adding devices like French l’Infaillible, German Revisor, Union, Optima, Maxima, Duplo, and Triplo by Jewrem Ugritschitsch and Dr. Albert Hauff from Berlin, English Adal, and others. Let’s examine one of the Grandjean-like devices—the Adal Calculator.

The spiral mechanical calculator, called Adal Calculator, was produced in the early 20^th century (1907-1915) by Adal Company, Temple Courts, Birmingham (ADAL is formed from the first letters of the names of the company owners—Armand Dreyfus and Alfred Levy, German Jews, who lived in England). It is a single-row adding machine with a diameter of 197 mm, 5 mm thick, 117 gr. weight, which consists of a pair of metal disks and a cursor. The base is a flat aluminum disk with the numbers 00 to 99 around an outer ring which forms a lip. Concentric with this disk, and laid upon it, is a thin brass disk which has one hundred small semi-circular indents and the numbers 00 to 99 in a ring around it. The main part of the upper disk is formed into a spiral of 11 turns. There is a tongue of brass attached to the central bolt, that has a slot in which a steel ball slides as it accumulates turns of the spiral disk. The slot of the tongue has the numbers 1 to 11 marked on it at intervals equivalent to the step between adjacent turns of the spiral. At its further end is a small clamp that holds it at the zero point of the outer ring so that it acts as a stop for the rotation of the accumulating spiral disk.

The whole calculator is held in the flat of the hand. It is a simple adder to 1199 with addends 1-99. The spiral disk is turned by a stylus set into the indent of the number to be added until it reaches the stop. As each number is added the spiral disk rotates and the small steel ball slides in the slot in the tongue indicating the hundreds count of the accumulated result. The total result is thus the number indicated on the tongue (being the hundreds digit) plus the number indicated in the end gap of the stop.

The Adal Calculator was patented in Great Britain (patents GB190705779 and GB190900621), the USA, and Canada (see the first US patent). It seems Dreyfus and Levy bought the rights for the design from Ugritschitsch and were allowed to serve the English and American markets. In 1909, the Addall Co. was incorporated in New York to manufacture the calculating machine.

The concept of the finger-driven touchscreen interface was put into words in 1965, by the British engineer Eric Arthur Johnson. He worked at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, England, and was interested in developing a touchscreen for air traffic control, as the UK National Air Defense was in need of a solution that would accelerate response time, minimize workloads, and allow for more accurate decision making for air traffic control operators.

In August 1965 Eric Johnson filed his first patent application, which was amended in 1966, and the complete specification was published on 26 November 1969 (see GB patent No. 1172222). In 1969 Johnson received also a US patent for his invention (see US patent Nr. 3482241).

In October 1965 Johnson described his ideas for a capacitive Touch Sensitive Electronic Data Display in a short 2-page article (Touch Display—A novel input/output device for computers. Electronics Letters, 1(8), 219-220). In 1967, he published another more comprehensive paper on the topic (Touch Displays: A Programmed Man-Machine Interface. Ergonomics, 10(2), 271-277), explaining how the technology worked through diagrams and photographs of a prototype. He also foresaw that the design could work as a keyboard for entering characters.

The touchscreen of Johnson was a device that used wires, sensitive to fingers’ touches, on the face of a cathode-ray tube (CRT) on which the computer could write information. His design consisted of a glass-coated insulator with a transparent conductor made of indium tin oxide. Thin copper wires placed across a computer’s CRT allowed the circuits to sense when they were being touched. Interestingly, although Johnson published the idea in the middle 1960s, it wasn’t made a reality or used by British air traffic controllers until the 1990s.

The next step was made in early 1972, by a Danish engineer working in CERN, Bent Stumpe (born 1938). He was asked by Frank Beck, who was in charge of the central control hub in the Super Proton Synchrotron, SPS, control room, to build the hardware for an intelligent system that, in just three console units, would replace all those conventional buttons, switches, etc.

In March 1972, after a few days, Stumpe presented a hand-written proposal to build a touch screen with a fixed number of programmable buttons. It also uses a tracker ball as a computer-controlled pointing device—something like a mouse—and a programmable knob.

“We had very little time to design the new system and demonstrate that both the hardware and the software could really work”, recollected Bent Stumpe. “Thanks to Chick Nichols from the CERN EP workshop, it was possible to evaporate a very thin layer of copper on a flexible and transparent Mylar sheet. This allowed us to produce the very first prototype of a capacitive touch screen.”

The first touchscreens, developed by Bent Stumpe, were installed in CERN in 1973 and remained in operation until 2008.

Furthermore, an LED screen is a flat panel screen that, thanks to a high number of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), can display both still images and movies, depending on your preferences. Their high brightness makes them ideal for outdoor activities. For further information, please see led event screen hire uk.

Christopher Strachey (1916–1975) was a British computer scientist, one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing, also been credited as possibly being the first developer of a video game.

Strachey was born to a prominent English family. Stracheys belonged to the Bloomsbury Group whose members included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Christopher’s uncle Lytton Strachey. At 13, Christopher went to Gresham’s School in Norfolk, where he showed signs of brilliance but in general, performed poorly. Then in 1935, he was admitted to King’s College, Cambridge (just as Alan Turing), where he studied mathematics and then transferred to physics, but continued to neglect his studies. At the end of his third year at Cambridge, Christopher suffered a nervous breakdown, possibly related to coming to terms with his homosexuality. He returned to Cambridge but managed only a “lower second” in the Natural Sciences Tripos.

In 1940, Strachey joined Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) as a research physicist, where he saw a calculating machine—a differential analyzer, which sparked his interest and he began to research the topic. After the war, he became a schoolmaster at St Edmund’s School, Canterbury, and three years later he was able to move to the more prestigious Harrow School in 1949, where he stayed for three years.

In early 1951, Strachey began his career as a programmer, using a reduced version of Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) the concept of which dated from 1945: the Pilot ACE. In his spare time, Strachey developed a program for the game of draughts (also known as “checkers”), which he finished a preliminary version in May 1951. The game completely exhausted the Pilot ACE’s memory. The draughts program tried to run for the first time on 30 July 1951 but was unsuccessful due to program errors. When Strachey heard about the Manchester Mark 1, which had a much bigger memory, he asked his former fellow student Alan Turing for the manual and transcribed his program into the operation codes of that machine by October 1951. By the summer of 1952, the program could “play a complete game of Draughts at a reasonable speed”. It may have been the first video game.

In 1951 Strachey programmed the first computer music in England and the earliest recording of music played by a computer—a rendition of the British National Anthem “God Save the King” on the Ferranti Mark 1 computer. During the summer of 1952, Strachey programmed a love letter generator for the Ferranti Mark 1 which is known as the first example of computer-generated literature.

In 1959 Strachey developed the concept of time-sharing, and filed a patent application in February of that year, and gave a paper “Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers” at the inaugural UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris where he passed the concept on to Joseph Licklider.

In the early 1960s, the biologist Joshua Lederberg (1925-2008), a 1958 Nobel Prize laureate for his discoveries of genetic transfer in bacteria, started working with computers. Over the summer of 1962, he learned to program on BALGOL (Burroughs Algol) for the Burroughs 220 computer (a 1957 vacuum-tube computer with core memory) and quickly succumbed to the hacker syndrome. Lederberg soon became tremendously interested in creating interactive computers to help him in his exobiology research. Specifically, he was interested in designing computing systems to help him study alien organic compounds.

As he was not an expert in either chemistry or computer programming, Lederberg collaborated with two other prominent Jewish-American scientists from Stanford—chemistry professor Carl Djerassi (1923-2015) to help him with chemistry, and the chairman of Stanford computer science department Edward Feigenbaum (b. 1936) with programming, to automate the process of determining chemical structures from raw mass spectrometry data. Feigenbaum was an expert in programming languages and heuristics (in the late 1950s he developed EPAM, one of the first computer models of how people learn) and helped Lederberg design a system that replicated the way Djerassi solved structure elucidation problems. They devised a system called DENDRitic ALgorithm (Dendral) that was able to generate possible chemical structures corresponding to the mass spectrometry data as an output.

DENDRAL (see a historical note), the first expert system in the world, was written in the Lisp programming language of John McCarthy, which was considered the language of artificial intelligence (AI) because of its flexibility. DENDRAL ran on a computer system called ACME (Advanced Computer for Medical Research), installed at Stanford Medical School in 1965 for use by resident researchers through time-sharing.

The project consisted of research on two main programs Heuristic Dendral (see the description) and Meta-Dendral, and several sub-programs. Heuristic Dendral is a performance system and Meta-Dendral is a learning system. The initial program was coded by the programist Georgia Sutherland, but later the Dendral team recruited Bruce Buchanan to extend the system. Buchanan wanted Dendral to make discoveries on its own, not just help humans make them. Thus he, Lederberg, and Feigenbaum designed “Meta-Dendral”, which was a “hypothesis maker”.

The greatest significance of DENDRAL lies in its theoretical and scientific contribution to the development of knowledge-based computer systems. Many later expert systems were derived from Dendral, including SUMEX, MYCIN, MOLGEN, PROSPECTOR, XCON, and STEAMER.

At the beginning of 1956, two young Cambridge scientists, the psychologist Gordon Pask (1928-1996) and physicist Robin McKinnon-Wood (1931-1995), created a hybrid teaching and learning analog computer, in response to a request by the Solartron Electronic Group for a machine to exhibit at the Physical Society Exhibition in London.

Gordon Pask was an English scientist, designer, researcher, academic, playwright, and one of the early proponents and practitioners of cybernetics, the study of control and communication in goal-driven systems of animals and machines. Originally trained as a mining engineer, he went on to complete his doctorate in psychology. His particular contribution was a formulation of second-order cybernetics as a framework that accounts for observers, conversations, and participants in cybernetic systems.

The operation of the machine, called Eucrates (after the archon of ancient Athens from the 6^th century BC, who was famed for neglect and excuses) was based on simulating the functioning of neurons. It was an embodiment of a conversation between machines, where one machine literally “teaches” the other. Let’s see the description of Eucrates, which appeared in the Monday, 4 June 1956, issue of TIME Magazine, London.

***

A schoolteacher who is tireless, vigilant and indifferent to big red apples was on exhibit at London’s Physical Society. The teacher is electronic and the creation of two young Cambridge scientists, Physicist McKinnon-Wood and Psychologist Gordon Pask, under contract with Solartron Electronic Group Ltd. Designed for teaching such routine skills as typing and running radar equipment, the electronic teacher gives patient, individual attention.

The trouble with human teachers, say Wood and Pask, is that unless they are extremely good, they cannot observe in detail the intimate characteristics of each pupil. Each pupil’s biases, habits and individual eccentricities determine how he should be taught. He may favor his left hand over his right hand, or be able to remember odd numbers better than even ones. An ideal teacher should take all such matters into account and teach accordingly.

Solartron’s electronic teacher is set up to teach how to duplicate patterns of light in a frame containing eight lights. It starts the lessons by showing a single light. In another frame another light appears, telling the pupil which button to press. After a few such easy examples, the lessons get harder. Light patterns can be duplicated only by complicated operations with the buttons. The teacher gives clues, tells the pupil whether he is doing well or badly and makes him repeat over and over if he is making errors. Always understanding, the machine holds back a difficult exercise until the pupil is ready. If set up to teach typing, it can tell the pupil which finger to use and in which direction to move it. If the pupil is a hardened hunt-and-peck typist, the teacher will discover his sloppy habits and set about correcting them at once.

Wood and Pask got so interested in the teaching problem that they created an electronic pupil named Eucrates I, to give the electronic teacher a real workout. Eucrates is electronic but not bright. When not being taught, he is “thinking” in a confused way, and the electronic teacher must take account of his thinking habits. Eucrates follows instructions and observes clues, but is often wrong. If the teacher is too severe or goes too fast, Eucrates shows signs of electronic emotion, equivalent to bursting into tears. Then the electronic teacher is gentle with him until his little dials have stopped quivering.

***

Later in 1956, Park and Wood invented Self-Adaptive Keyboard Instructor (SAKI), a machine, that adapts to the learner’s performance level (it was essentially a system for teaching people how to increase speed and accuracy in typing alphabetic and numeric symbols using a 12-key keyboard.) In late 1956, Park and Wood also created an improved version of Eucrates, called (surprise!) Solartron EUCRATES II.

In his book “An Approach to Cybernetics” (1961) Gordon Pask presents “learning machines”. Pask designates “Eucrates” as “simulating a pupil-teacher system”. The model reconstructs the behavior of “real neurons” and their “absolute refractory period”. The reactions of the “motor-elements” to the input are varying because of a shifting threshold: The threshold increases after the first input with the consequence for learners that they have to wait with further inputs until the threshold falls. “Memory-elements” react to the output of the “motor-elements”. The “memory-elements” are constructed following the example of “the synaptic connections of a neuron”: “Now it is obvious that various modes of activity and various forms of interaction [between a pupil and a teacher or the learning machine] will build up the network.” Pask writes this sentence after a short explanation of possible “interconnections” between “motor-elements” and the learning activities within the “network”. Capable of surviving within the “network” are only the connections that “mediate a favorable behavior”.

With the complex adding systems that we have today, it can be hard to grasp that people were using small stones or other objects as numerical devices from time immemorial. The word calculate itself comes from the Latin calculus, which means small stone. These methods of calculations introduced some elementary kind of abstraction, but people gradually realized that this method did not go far enough to satisfy their increasing needs. To count up to 1000, for example, they would have had to gather a thousand pebbles, which was enormous work.

That is why, once the principle of the numerical base had been grasped, the usual pebbles were replaced with stones of various sizes to which different orders of units were assigned. For example, if a decimal system was used, the number 1 could be represented by a small stone, 10 by a larger one, 100 by a still larger one, and so on. It was a matter of time before someone thought of arranging some pebbles over a big flat base stone, wire, or something else.

It is unknown when exactly were developed first devices to facilitate calculation, such as the counting board, or abacus. The counting board was invented when someone grasped the idea of placing pebbles or other objects in columns marked on a flat surface and assigning an order of units to the objects in each column. Later, loose objects in columns were replaced with beads that could slide along parallel rods.

There is unproved information, that a similar to the abacus device was used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BC. The word abacus itself is a Latin word, that comes from Greek άβακασ (board or table). The Greek word probably comes from the Semitic abk, which means sand, dust or to wipe the dust, which can suggest to us, that Greeks accepted the idea of an abacus from the Phoenicians (which is the case with the Greek alphabet, inspired by the Phoenician alphabet). Actually, the Romans applied the word abacus (and also the word calculi, which comes from calculus (stone, pebble) to various objects, all with the common characteristic of having a flat surface: tables used in different kinds of games, sideboards and the calculating device still known as the abacus. The Greeks used besides the above-mentioned type of abacus, also so-called dust abacus—a box, full of sand (or dust), divided into columns, over which can be arranged pebbles or other small objects.

The first written information about the abacus that survived to the present, is from the Greek historian Herodotus (480-425 B.C.), who mentioned also, that the ancient Egyptians used abacus. The oldest abacus, which survived to the present day, is the so-called Salamis abacus (see the nearby figure). It was named after the Greek island of Salamis, in the vicinity of which it was found in 1846 and was described later by the Greek archaeologist Alexander Rizo-Rangabe.

The Salamis abacus (kept now in the Epigraphical Museum of Athens) is dated around 300 B.C. and is a large slab of white marble (broken in half now), 149 cm long and 75 cm wide, with five parallel lines engraved into it and, below them, eleven parallel lines divided in half by a perpendicular line. The third, sixth, and ninth of these eleven lines are marked by crosses at their points of intersection with the perpendicular line. Three nearly identical series of Greek characters, which are numerical signs for noting sums of money in the Greek monetary system (the basic unit is drachma, but there are also 2 smaller units—obols and khalkoses, and 2 bigger, which actually were never minted—minas and talents), are engraved on three sides of the slab.

The four columns on the top were used for fractions of the drachma, the first one corresponding to khalkoses (1/48 of a drachma), the second to quarter-obols (1/24 of a drachma), the third to half-obols (1/12 of a drachma), and the fourth to obols (1/6 of a drachma). The next five columns were associated with multiples of the drachma: the first on the right corresponded to units, the second to tens, the third to hundreds, and so on. The last five columns (in the bottom part) were respectively associated with talents, tens of talents, hundreds, and so on. Since a talent was equivalent to 6000 drachmas, counters representing 6000 drachmas were replaced with one counter in the talents column. By means of these different divisions, the reckoner could perform addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

There is also another interesting old Greek artifact, the so-called Darius Vase, dated about 500 B.C., in the museum at Naples, which contains a picture of an abacus-like instrument (see the nearby drawing).

Pictures (but not an artifact yet) of a Roman table abacus were found on an Etruscan cameo, on a Roman pier, and on a relief of the Capitoline Museum in Rome.

The Roman abacus was similar to the Greek one (see the nearby photo). It consisted of a small metal tablet with parallel grooves, usually nine of them, each corresponding to an order of units, in which spherical counters slid. The abacus in the upper figure has 8 decimal positions (leftmost), for the units, tens, hundreds, and so on to the 100 millions (marked with I, X, C…). When the units of a certain order did not go beyond four, the reckoner indicated them in the corresponding lower groove by pushing up as many counters as necessary. When they reached or went beyond five, he first pushed down the counter in the upper groove (representing five units in the order of that groove), then pushed up as many counters as necessary in the lower groove. The ninth position from the left (marked with O) has an upper part containing one counter and a lower part containing five. It served to indicate multiples of an ounce, each lower counter representing one ounce and the upper counter six ounces. The rightmost groove is divided into 3 parts and is used to indicate a half-ounce, a quarter-ounce, and a duella, or a third of an ounce.

During the so-called Dark Ages in Western Europe, the art of counting with the abacus was more or less forgotten. One of the first scientists, who not only popularized the Hindu-Arabic digits but also reintroduced the abacus, was (surprise!) Gerbert d’Aurillac (c. 946-1003), archbishop of Rheims and chancellor of France, well-known as Pope Sylvester II (see the nearby image). Gerbert lived some time in Spain and took the idea of the abacus from Spanish Arabs (in 967, he went to Catalonia to visit the Count of Barcelona, and remained three years in the monastery of Vic, which, like all Catalan Monasteries, contained manuscripts from Muslim Spain and especially from Cordoba, one of the intellectual centers of Europe at that time). The abacus that Gerbert reintroduced into Europe had its length divided into 27 parts with 9 number jetons, so-called apices (this would exclude zero, which was represented by an empty column) and 1000 apices in all, crafted out of animal horn by a shieldmaker of Rheims. For example, with Gerbert’s abacus, the number 308 will be expressed with an apex for 3 in the hundreds column and with an apex for 8 in the column of units. According to his pupil Richer, Gerbert could perform speedy calculations with his abacus, which were extremely difficult for people in his day to think through in using only Roman numerals, that was one of the reasons Gerbert was suspected as a magician and servant of the Devil 🙂 Due to Gerbert’s reintroduction, the abacus became widely used in Western Europe once again during the 11^th century.

The first printed book on arithmetic and the operation of the abacus in Europe was the anonymous Arte dell’Abbaco, (Treviso, 1478). The most popular kind of abacus still in use during the Renaissance in Europe was a table on which lines marked off the different decimal orders (so-called reckoning table). The pebbles previously used as counters have been replaced by specially minted coin-like objects (like apices, introduced by Gerbert) that are cast, thrown, or pushed on the abacus table. They are called jetons from jeter (to throw) in France and werpgeld for “thrown money” in Holland. All administrations, merchants, bankers, lords, and rulers had reckoning tables with counters bearing their own marks, made of base metal, gold, or silver, depending on their rank or social position.

The value of a counter depended on its position. On consecutive lines, going from bottom to top, it was worth 1, 10, 100, 1000, and so on. Between two consecutive lines, it was worth five units of the line immediately below it. Addition was done in the left (or forward) part of the frame, by placing counters corresponding to the numbers involved, then reducing them and taking account of the value assigned to each location. To multiply two numbers, the reckoner began by representing the first one in the left part of the frame, then he eliminated one by one the counters representing this number as he replaced them in the right (or rear) part of the frame with their products by the second number. Computation on the reckoning table was taught till the eighteenth century. The fact that it was discussed in many European arithmetic books in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries gives an idea of how common it was. It was so firmly anchored in European tradition, that even when written computation with Hindu-Arabic numerals was becoming general, results obtained in that way were always checked on a reckoning table, just to be sure.

The reckoning table made addition and subtraction easy, but for more complex operations it was slow and required long training. This drawback must have been what prompted the fierce controversy that began early in the sixteenth century between the abacists, who clung to the reckoning table and the archaic Greek and Roman numerations, and the algorists, who advocated a form of written computation (see the nearby figure). Written computation was quickly adopted by scientists (especially by mathematicians and astronomers), while the reckoning table continued to be used in business and finance.

A quite different and much more advanced form and methods for calculation can be seen in the development of the abacus in Asia. The Chinese started to use counting boards, the prototype of the abacus, as early as the 4^th century BC. The Chinese counting board was a wooden plate, divided into columns, and calculations were made by means of bamboo or ivory sticks (see the nearby figure for the two ways of representation of digits). In the rightmost column are denoted units, in the next—tens, and so on. Some historians even claim, that this namely was the first use of the decimal numbering system in the world. The most famous Chinese mathematical text—Chiu chang suan shu (Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art), which dates from the period of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 220), gives details of algebraic operations on the counting board, including the solution of a system of n equations with n unknowns.

The long and gradual improvement of the Chinese counting board led to the development (sometimes in the 2^nd century) of a more convenient type of abacus—the bead abacus, mentioned in the book of Xu Yue, Supplementary Notes on the Art of Figures, written about the year 190 A. D. The Chinese bead abacus (so-called suanpan) has a rectangular wooden frame with thin rods across it. On each rod are placed seven glass or wooden beads: five (the number of fingers of a human) below the strip of wood, that divides the frame into two unequal parts, and two above it (the number of hands).

The rods correspond to numerical values increasing tenfold from right to left. (Base 10 is not obligatory, of course; another base, such as 12 or 20, could be used if an adequate number of beads were placed on the rods.) If the first rod on the right corresponds to units, the second one corresponds to tens, the third to hundreds, and so on. Users of the suanpan, however, do not always begin with the first rod on the right to represent whole numbers: they sometimes begin with the third from the right, reserving the first two for centesimal and decimal fractions.

Each of the five beads on the lower part of a rod has the value of one unit of the order corresponding to the rod, and each of the two beads on the upper part has the value of five units. Numbers are formed by moving beads toward the crossbar separating the upper and lower parts of the rods. To form the number four, for example, the user simply raises four beads on the lower part of the first rod on the right. For eight, he lowers one upper bead on that rod and raises three lower ones.

As can be seen, there is some kind of redundancy in the notation of numbers in suanpan. Nine units of the order corresponding to a given rod are represented by one upper bead with the value of five units and four lower beads with the value of one unit each. Five beads are thus enough to represent nine units. This raises the question of why each rod has seven beads, which allowed a total value of 15 to be entered. The reason is that in doing division on an abacus, it is often helpful to indicate, temporarily, a number greater than 9 on a single rod. For the three other operations, five beads on each rod are enough. In the case of division, however, the calculation may be simplified if a partial result greater than 9 is temporarily indicated on one rod.

Sometime in the late 16^th century, the Chinese suanpan was adopted in Japan, under the name soroban. The soroban however was gradually simplified, and from the middle of the 17^th century, the number of beads in the lower part was reduced to 4, while in the upper part remained only 1 bead. This means, that the redundancy of the suanpan was removed, due to the fact, that the older Chinese division method, which makes use of the cumbersome division table, was formerly replaced by the Japanese division method, which makes use of the multiplication table.

Another country, in which the bead abacus was extremely popular, apart from China and Japan, at least in recent times, is Russia. The Russian abacus, so-called русские счёты (russkie schoty) (see the nearby photo) was first mentioned in 1658, in an inventory book. The construction of schoty probably was based on the Chinese suanpan, but was quite different in the design. The main difference between suanpan and schoty is the horizontal position of the rods in the schoty (so the beads are slid right-to-left), and the rods have a slight curvature to prevent the “counted” beads from accidentally sliding back to the home position. The typical schoty has several (usually 8 to 10) decimal positions, and 1 position with 4 beads (which not only acts as a separator or for fractions, but can be also used for calculations in polushki, the Russian monetary system in this time was constituted by polushki, kopeiki (1 kopeika equal to 4 polushki), and roubles (1 roubla equal to 100 kopeiki)).

The Russian abacus has some improved variants, like Markov’s abacus (счетьi Маркова), double abacus (двойньiе счетьi), Ezerski’s abacus (счетьi Езерскаго), Kompaneiski’s abacus (счетьi Компанейскаго), etc.

The Russian abacus is still in common use today in shops and markets throughout the former Soviet Union, although it is no longer taught in most schools. Around 1820, the Russkie schoty was brought to Europe (first to France, under the name boulier-compteur), though not as a calculating device, but rather as a didactic tool for beginning course of arithmetic.

American Indians also used calculating tools. At the beginning of the 1600s, the Quechua nobleman Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote a letter to the King of Spain, containing 1179 pages. The letter includes several drawings that show quipus (recording devices used in the region of Andean South America, consisting of colored, spun, and plied thread or strings) and a picture of a counting board in the bottom left-hand corner of one of them (see the nearby picture). This is called the yupana and is presumed to be the counting board of the Incas.

In 1895 three of the mechanics, who worked in the factory of Arthur Burkhardt in Glashütte—Ernst Eduard Zeibig (1856-1944), Friedrich Eugin Straßberger (1857-1945), who started with Curt Dietzschold in 1878, and Josef Schumann (1862-1913), who was a foreman in the factory, decided to leave and to found a new factory for calculating machines—Rechenmaschinen-Fabrik “Saxonia” Schumann & Cie (there was an anonymous donor who believed in the entrepreneurial spirit of the three mechanics because they had no money to start a company.)

In this factory was produced the successful calculating machine Saxonia. Schumann left the company in 1912 (probably due to poor health because he died the next year), but the founders Zeibig & Straßberger continued to run the company together. Later on in 1920, the factory Saxonia merged with Burkhardt’s factory, and the newly joined company United Glashütte Rechenmaschinenfabriken was opened. It will continue production up to March 1929 when a bankruptcy of the company was opened.

Joseph Schumann was born in 1862 in Kostenblut, a village in Silesia, and learned watchmaking there. After his apprenticeship, he worked for some time for the prominent German clockmaker Gustav Eduard Becker (1819-1885) in Freiburg, Silesia (now Świebodzice, Poland). In 1883 Schumann moved to Glashütte and worked there for several years as a mechanic in Burkhardt’s calculating machine factory, then was appointed foreman. He died on 22 September 1913, in Glashütte at the age of 51.

The first models of the machine certainly are almost identical to Burkhardt’s Arithmometer, but later models had many improvements, such as a rotary setting lever by which a dust-tight encapsulation mechanism was possible, a moment cancellation mechanism, rolling box lid. There was even a model with a keyboard, instead of the traditional sliders of stepped-drum machines.

Over 12000 Saxonia machines were manufactured and sold from 1895 to 1914.

Great Britain’s first robot Eric was created in 1928 by the First World War veteran and a noted journalist Captain William Richards (known as WH) and by the early aviator and aircraft engineer Alan Reffell, to replace George VI (then the Duke of York) in opening the Exhibition of the Society of Model Engineers in London in September, 1928.

Captain Richards was secretary of the Society of Model Engineers, and when the Duke of York announced that was unable to open the Exhibition of the Society on 20 September 1928, he decided to create a robot to take the Duke’s place, using the help of the engineer Alan Reffell, whom he knew from his service in the air force. Richards was also an amateur engineer, keen on models and early technology. He must have been quite intrigued by Karel Čapek’s play, Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.), performed in London in 1923 and which is credited for being the first time the word robot was used. Thus Eric was born with RUR emblazoned on his chest.

At the appropriate time on that date in the Royal Horticultural Hall, Eric Robot arose, bowed, looked to the right and the left, and with appropriate gestures, proceeded to give a four-minute opening address, as sparks flashed from his teeth.

The Eric robot was manufactured in Gomshall in Surrey, where the Reffell family had a small motor business. It cost only £140 to build, weighed 45 kg, was 180 cm tall, and had light bulbs for eyes. It was operated by two people, and his voice was received live by a radio signal. Eric was able to stand, from an initial seated position, to turn his head in the direction of onlookers, to raise his arms, and to talk.

Although able to sit and stand, Eric could not move his legs to walk. The use of 35000 volts of electricity causes blue sparks to emanate from his teeth. His feet are fastened to a box, in which there is a twelve-volt electric motor. Inside his body, there is another motor, eleven electro-magnets, and about three miles of wire. He can move his arms and his head just as any real man does when speaking.

A report in the USA’s Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper dated 20 Feb 1929 states:
Eric Robot, “the perfect man,” made his first public appearance in America on the stage of the John Golden Theater, 58th St. and Broadway, yesterday afternoon.
Eric arrived from England with Capt. William Henry Richards, secretary of the Model Engineering Association of England, 14 days ago, and plans a tour of the continent. Eric is the mechanical man invented by Captain Richards after many years of private experimental work and was exhibited before the public for the first time 17 weeks ago in London.
Eric is made of aluminum, copper, steel, miles of wire, dynamos and electro-magnets. His eyes are two white electric bulbs, and his teeth, or rather tooth, is a blue bulb which, on the command, “Smile, Eric,” appears, accompanied by a sputtering sound. The upper half of Mr. Robot’s body, Captain Richards explained, is devoted to the speaking mechanism, and the rest to the movable parts. Eric made a five-minute speech yesterday, talking in an ordinary male voice. Eric was bombarded with questions by the audience, and having been posted with answers to hundreds of probable questions, made a fairly good showing.

The Eric robot was so successful that after his appearance he embarked on a world tour, with amazing crowds in Britain and Europe, before vanishing forever after the four-month promotional tour to the US in 1929. During the US tour, the robot introduced himself to an audience in New York as “Eric the robot, the man without a soul”. The New York Press described him as “the perfect man”.

Richards went on to conceive and build an improved robot called George in 1930, which he further co-developed with his son, W.E. (Ted) Richards, a motor engineer and WWI veteran. They traveled extensively together promoting George culminating in a tour of Australia in 1935-1936. George could deliver speeches in French, German, Hindustani, Chinese and Danish. He cost almost £2,000 to build, compared to Eric’s £140, and The Age newspaper described him as “the educated gentleman, alongside his rough-hewn awkward brother”.

Eventually, the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 seems to have put an end to Richards’ activities with robots.

Biographies of William Richards and Alan Reffell

William Henry Richards was a man who wore many hats! He was born near Totnes, Devon, England on 4 September 1868. William began his civilian career as a printer from which he progressed to becoming a journalist. He and his first wife, Thirza, had four children and eventually settled in Camberwell, London.

In the late 1890s, Richards became a soldier, having served initially in the Royal North Devon Hussars, then in Imperial Yeomanry, which arrived in South Africa in March 1900 and took part in the Boer War. During the First World War, he served in Turkey (Gallipoli), then in Greece, Egypt, France, and Flanders, where it appears that he was a war correspondent.

After 1919 Richards was a journalist for the Plymouth-based Western Morning News, and later, the Manchester Guardian, The Illustrated London News, and the Daily Sketch. He was a member of the Press Club in London and later as he became more entrepreneurial, he was the proprietor of the London News Agency in Fleet Street, a specialty agency involved in sales and marketing. WH was also an amateur engineer, keen on models and early technology.

Richards was widowed in 1929 and remarried in 1930 to his secretary, Winifred. He retired to a country cottage in Guildford, Surrey, where he died on Christmas day (25 December) 1948, aged 80 years.

Alan Herbert Reffell was born on 14 March 1895 in Shere, Guildford, Surrey. His parents were William Joseph Reffell (1859-1931) and Kate Maria Boorer (1869-1909). He was the second of three sons and also had four sisters.

Alan Herbert joined the Royal Flying Corps as an Aircraft Mechanic before the outbreak of WWI aged only 18 in 1913. During the war, he served in a number of squadrons including some in France, and was awarded the 1914 (Mons) Star, the Victory Medal & the British War Medal, and the French Medaille Militaire. In 1919 he was transferred to reserve and in 1921 he was discharged.

Reffell married Violet Mary Durant (born 1897) on 21 November 1915 in Guildford, Surrey, and they had two sons: Roger Alan Reffell (1918-2007) and John L. Reffell (1920-1920).

Reffell was a holder of two patents in Britain and the USA for flotation gear for aircraft from 1932 (GB695198 and US1956494).

After the First World War, Alan Reffell ran a motor business in Gomshall Surrey, and worked on a number of interesting projects, including Eric Robot. He carried on his motor business between the wars and later expanded into making engineering lathes for a World War II government contract.

Alan Herbert Reffell died on 26 October 1979, at Crawley Sussex, aged 84.

Dr. Alexander John Thompson was a British statistician, the author of the last great table of logarithms, published in nine parts from 1924 to 1952. His table, the Logarithmetica Britannica, gives the logarithms of all numbers from 1 to 100000 to 20 places and supersedes all previous tables of similar scope, in particular the tables of Henry Briggs (1624), Adriaan Vlacq (1628) and Gaspard de Prony (1790s).

Thompson started his project of a new table of logarithms in 1922, celebrating the 300^th birthday of Briggs’ Arithmetica logarithmica. Initially, he started calculations of the tables with a single commercial mechanical calculating machine. However, he realized soon that with a special differential machine for processing four or five differences, the work could be done much more easily.

Thus Thompson constructed a machine (called Integrating and differencing machine), consisting of four successively arranged individual machines, standing on a staircase-shaped box and connected to each other (see the nearby figure). The assembly was made by the German company Triumphator in Leipzig-Mölkau. The individual machines were conversions from commercially available machines, that are expanded to 13 locations in the input mechanism.

Thompson’s desire for a printing unit and for mechanisms for automatically performing calculations failed because of the too-long development cycle and the associated high costs.

A detailed description of Thompson’s method of calculation and machine was compiled by Mr. Stephan Weiss (Die Differenzenmaschine von A. J. Thompson und die Logarithmetica Britannica).

Biography of Alexander John Thompson

Alexander John Thompson was born in 1885 in Plaistow, Essex, England (now a suburban area of East London). In 1905 he entered the Civil Service and served in a number of government departments. In 1920, A. J. Thompson joined the statistical staff of the General Register Office, Somerset House, London. Until his retirement in 1945, he was engaged in designing and writing official statistical reports on births, marriages, and deaths and on the Census of England and Wales.

A. J. Thompson was a Bachelor of Science (1911) and Ph.D. (1927, for Logarithmetica Britannica, parts IX (1924) and VIII (1927)), from the University of London. He was a member (1928-1965), vice-chairman (1938-1947), and chairman (1947-1948) of the Mathematical Tables Committee of the Royal Society.

Alexander John Thompson died on 17 June 1968, in Wallington, Surrey.

The robot word was conceived at the beginning of 1920 by the Czech writer and playwright Karel Čapek (with the help of his brother Josef, an acclaimed painter, graphic artist, writer, and poet), and was introduced in his drama R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), published in November 1920 (see the lower image). Since then, and almost immediately, the robot word has become a universal expression in most languages for artificial intelligence machines, invented by humans.

How was the word robot invented, and what it means?

Karel Čapek described the occasion some 13 years later in the newspaper Lidové noviny of 24 December 1933 (in Kulturní kronika column, on page 12, see the text in English and the original report below):

The note of Prof. Chudoba about mentioning the Robot word in the Oxford dictionary and its derivation in English reminds me that I have an old duty. The author of the play RUR did not, in fact, invent that word, he merely ushered it into existence. It was like this: the idea for the play came to said author in a single, unexpected moment. And while it was still fresh he rushed immediately to his brother Josef, a painter, who was just standing by the easel, vigorously painting on a canvas.
“Listen, Josef,” the author began, “I think I have an idea for a play.”
“What kind of?” the painter mumbled (he really did mumble, because at the moment he was holding a brush in his mouth). The author told him as concisely as he could.
“Then write it,” the painter said, without taking the brush from his mouth or stopping to work on the canvas. His indifference was quite insulting.
“But,” the author said, “I don’t know what to call those artificial workers. I could call them Laboři, but that strikes me as a bit literal.”
“Then call them Roboti,” the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and carried on painting. So it happened…

How did the quick-witted Josef Čapek conceive the robot word? It seems Josef just wanted ASAP to get rid of his annoying younger brother, so he momentarily found the Czech equivalent of the proposed by Karel term laboři, using the Czech/Slavic word robota (meaning “(hard) work” not only in Czech, but also in the other Slavic languages like Bulgarian, Slovak, Russian, Serbian, Polish, and Ukrainian), which comes from the word rab (meaning “slave”). As it was mentioned in the report (Čapek is referring to the Czech writer, literary historian, and translator František Chudoba), it is also possible Josef to had encountered this word in some historic text, because according to the Oxford English Dictionary robot word was used to mean a central European system of serfdom whereby tenants’ rent was paid in forced labor or service. The system was abolished in the Austrian Empire in 1848 but was probably still in living memory in Čapek’s time.

How was the drama R.U.R. inspired?

Although in the second half of his life, Karel Čapek became a keen anti-fascist and anti-communist, as a young he was preoccupied with the difficult conditions of the factory workers and the brutal attitude of their managers ever since writing the story Systém (Krakonošova zahrada) together with his brother Josef, published in 1918. The memory of the Úpice (the hometown of Karel) textile workers on strike whom he had witnessed, seeing their march through the town, and the knowledge of newly introduced mass production and scientific management methods of manufacturing became his inspiration. In Systém Čapek brothers described the action of a greedy factory owner who tried to employ workers devoid of human needs, ideas, and emotions, purely to be used as automata and working machines to achieve the most efficient manufacturing means.

A further inspiration came at the beginning of 1920 when Karel took a tram from Prague’s suburbs to the city center. The tram was so uncomfortably overcrowded, that people were pressed together inside, even spilling outside onto the tram steps, appearing not like herded sheep, but like machines. Thus Karel imagined people not as individuals but as machines and during the journey thought about an expression that would describe a human being only able to work but not able to reason.

With that in mind, in the spring of 1920, Karel began to write a drama about the manufacture of artificial people from synthetic organic material who would free humans of work and drudgery, but finally due to overproduction those roboti would lead humankind to destruction and annihilation.

The play describes the activities of Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.) company that makes artificial people from man-made synthetic, organic matter. These beings are not mechanical creatures, as they may be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves. Initially, they seem happy to work for humans, but that changes with time, and at the end a hostile robot revolt points to the extinction of the human race, perhaps to be saved by a male robot and a female robot acting as Adam and Eve.

R.U.R. premiered in January 1921 and quickly became famous and influential in both Europe and North America. By 1923, it had been translated into thirty languages. The play was described as “thought-provoking”, “a highly original thriller”, “a play of exorbitant wit and almost demonic energy” and was considered one of the “classic titles” of inter-war science fiction.