THE MECHANICAL AGE

1450-1840
B Y:

Czarina Xyl ha Bonao

Cathlyn Mae Chua

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
 To determine the inventions and
discoveries in the mechanical age

 To determine the technologies

that are developed in this
Mechanical Age era
INTRODUCTION

•The Mechanical Age can be defined

as the time between 1450 and 1840.
A lot of technologies are developed
in this era as there is a large
explosion in interest with this era.
INTRODUCTION

The mechanical age is when

we first start to see connections
between our current
technology and its ancestors.
THE FOLLOWING ARE THE
INVENTORS OF THE
TECHNOLOGIES IN THE
MECHANICAL AGE
John Napier (1614)

•  Napier was loved by all, and he

was respected by many
illustrious scientists and
mathematicians of the age, to the
point of being considered some
sort of scientific superstar, with
"fans" awaiting his next
publication the way we await the
release of a movie or pop album.
 LOGS
Logs allow
multiplication and
division to be
reduced to
addition and
subtraction .
Johann
Gutenberg
• invented the movable
metal-type printing
process in 1450 and
sped up the process of
composing pages from
weeks to a few minutes.
The First Information
Explosion PRINTING
PROCESS

• The development of
book indexes and the
widespread use of
page numbers.
MATH BY
MACHINE
• The first general purpose
"computers" were people who
held the job title "computer:
one who works with numbers."
Difficulties in human errors
were slowing scientists and
mathematicians in their pursuit
of greater knowledge.
 WILLIAM
OUGHTRED
In the early 1600s, William
Oughtred, an English clergyman,
invented the slide rule.
Slide Rules, the Pascaline and Leibniz's
Machine
SLIDE RULE SLIDE RULE EXAMPLE

a device that allowed the user to

multiply and divide by sliding two
pieces of precisely machines and
scribed wood against each other.

slide rule is an early example of an

analog computer — an instrument
that measures instead of counts
Blaise Pascal
• Blaise Pascal, later to
become a famous French
mathematician, built one of
the first mechanical
computing machines as a
teenage, around 1642.
Pascaline
• also called Arithmetic
Machine, the first calculator
or adding machine to be
produced in any quantity. 

• used a series of wheels and

cogs to add and subtract
numbers.
Gottfried von
Leibniz
• A German mathematician and
philosopher (he independently
invented calculus at the same time
as Newton).
• He was able to improve on
Pascal's machine in the 1670s by
adding additional components that
made multiplication and division
easier
Step Reckoner

• a calculating machine designed
(1671) and built (1673) by the
German mathematician-
philosopher 
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. 

• The Step Reckoner expanded on the

French mathematician-philosopher 
Blaise Pascal’s ideas and did
multiplication by repeated addition
and shifting.
Charles Babbage
• An eccentric English mathematician
Charles Babbage, frustrated by
mistakes, set his mind to creating a
machine that could both calculate
numbers and print the results.
• He was able to produce a working
model of his first attempt, which he
called the Difference Engine.
The Difference
Engine
• The difference engine name was
based on a method of solving
mathematical equations called the
"method of differences.”
• Made of toothed wheels and shafts
turned by a hand crank.
• The machine could do computations
and create charts showing the
squares and cubes of numbers.
Ada Augusta Lovelace
(1842)

The first program

was written by Ada
Augusta Lovelace
(1815-1852)
or Lady Byron.
1ST computer programmer

• Lady Byron, she is

credited as being the first
computer programmer.
The programming
language Ada is named in
her honor.
THE END