Wilhelm schickard biography

German astronomer and computing pioneer

Wilhelm Schickard (22 April &#; 24 October ) was a German professor of Hebrew and astronomy who became famous in the second part of the 20th century after Franz Hammer, a biographer (along with Max Caspar) of Johannes Kepler, claimed that the drawings of a calculating clock, predating the public release of Pascal's calculator by twenty years, had been discovered in two unknown letters written by Schickard to Johannes Kepler in and ^[1][2]

Hammer asserted that because these letters had been lost for three hundred years, Blaise Pascal had been called^[3] and celebrated as^[4] the inventor of the mechanical calculator in error during all this time.

After careful examination it was found that Schickard's drawings had been published at least once per century starting from ,^[5] that his machine was not complete and required additional wheels and springs^[6] and that