Pascal was the inventor of the calculator. He also contributed to science and physics a lot. Pascal was one of the most influential Frenchmen of his time.
Blaise Pascal was born in 1623. When he was a young boy, Pascal’s family moved from the country where they lived before to Paris. There, his father bought bonds. Bonds are basically giving the government a loan that they promise to pay back over time with some interest. That income they lived off of. The government decided not to pay Pascal’s father back all that it owed him, and so Pascal’s father became poor, and not by his own doing. The government at least gave him a job collecting the taxes from the people of France. Being the tax collector meant Pascal’s father had to do lots of math. The stakes were high. A miscalculation could cost Pascal’s Father his life. Pascal wanted to make his father’s job easier and less risky for him, so he decided to invent his calculator to help his father with all the math he had to do every day. Pascal was 19 when he invented his calculator, also referred to as the Pascaline.
Pascal tried to sell it commercially but it failed, as it was too expensive to manufacture.
Pascal also contributed to mathematics. He created Pascal’s triangle, which is a triangle that starts at the top with 1, then the sum of the two numbers above it creates the number below it. Here is the first 5 rows:
1
1 1
1 2 1
1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1
Pascal also contributed to lots of other parts of mathematics and physics, but I do not have time to go over that here. Pascal was a very influential man. He invented the first true calculator, and also contributed to other parts of mathematics. I respect him for that.