Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor and philosopher. He began working on calculating machines as a child prodigy in 1642 to help his father, a tax commissioner, with tedious arithmetic.
As a result, he invented the Pascaline, a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction. Its most significant innovation was a mechanism for the decimal carry operation, automatically transferring a digit to the next column when a sum was over nine. This became a fundamental concept required of all subsequent mechanical calculators.