Pascal’s nearly 400-year-old calculator, considered one of the first attempts to replace the human mind with a machine, has gone up for auction, prompting immediate outrage.
Hundreds of years before battery-powered calculators, smartphones, and dropping math problems into ChatGPT, counting required much more effort. The brilliant 19-year-old decided to do something about it and created an extremely innovative device at the time, which was ultimately intended to help his father – a tax collector who struggled with a lot of calculations every day. Young Blaise Pascal could not have realized back then that his idea would evolve over the next centuries, completely changing the face of mathematics. He also could not have realized that the invention would reach a staggering value of EUR 3 million in 2025. It was for this amount that La Pascaline was supposed to be sold at auction, but the French court intervened. All because of the intervention of the scientific community.
From the 17th century abacus to computers
When the first computers began to appear in the last century, the saying became established that they were simply oversized and insanely expensive calculators. This tells us a lot about how long and winding the road was from Pascal’s invention to the laptop on which I am writing this text. Blaise Pascal created a machine called La Pascaline in 1642 – at a time when even dreaming about something like a computer could land you in the hands of the church inquisition.
This primitive calculator allowed addition and subtraction using a system of gears and ratchets. Each wheel corresponded to a different number, and when one wheel turned completely, it moved to the next one. Some historians claim that it was the first step towards automation and computerization, because Pascal’s machine inspired Gottfried Leibniz, who later created a more advanced calculator that could perform multiplication and division – and he is considered the ancestor of Babbage’s later machines, which turned into the first computers.
This is an absolutely unique invention, and for professional scientists it is even priceless. It was this story behind La Pascaline that motivated the French scientific community to intervene – otherwise the machine would have been sold.
La Pascaline can look forward to becoming a national treasure
One of the 9 remaining Pascal calculators in the world was included in the auction of the library of the late Catalan collector Léon Parcé. The procedure was to be handled by the Christie’s auction house, and according to estimates, La Pascaline could have been sold for up to EUR 3 million – the auction house’s owners directly called the invention the most valuable exhibit that Christie’s had ever acquired.
However, before all formalities were completed, French researchers filed an appeal, which involved the Paris administrative court in the case. During the proceedings, irregularities were found and the legality of the export permit issued by the Minister of Culture in May was questioned. However, the main reason for suspending the transaction was the historical value of the exhibit, which is part of the national heritage. La Pascaline may be eligible for national treasure status, which would give the nearly 400-year-old calculator legal protection.
This is an important and even symbolic event, especially today, in the era of rapid development of artificial intelligence. La Pascaline is considered the first attempt in history to replace the human mind with a machine – in 2025 AI talks like a human, jokes like a human and “thinks” like a human. All that remains is to give it a humanoid form and teach emotions – perhaps in 400 years our successors will remember the first quarter of the 21st century as the time of the quantum leap that changed the fate of humanity.
Stock image from Depositphotos
