Wilhelm Schickard (1592–1635)

The orientalist, astronomer, and cartographer Wilhelm Schickard was born in Herrenberg in the duchy of Württemberg on 22 April 1592. After attending the monastic school at Bebenhausen, he studied theology at the university of Tübingen, where he was taught both mathematics and astronomy by Michael Mästlin. Between 1614 and 1619, Schickard served as a Lutheran minister in nearby Nürtingen, during which time he met Johannes Kepler (who was in Tübingen to assist his mother following the charge made against her of witchcraft).

In 1619, Schickard was appointed professor of Hebrew at the University of Tübingen. The textbook of Hebrew he created for his students, Horologium Hebraeum, was used widely and was reprinted many times over the following century. He constructed also a mechanical device, the ‘Hebraea Rota’, to assist with the learning of verbs and, in 1625, he published Ius regium Hebraeorum about the laws of the Jewish kings, a work that was praised highly by Hugo de Groot.

It seems likely that to support Johannes Kepler’s complex calculations for the Rudolphine tables, Schickard invented the first known calculating machine [Rechenuhr] that was able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The original machine is now lost and a second machine is known to have been destroyed by fire. Although Schickard is famous today for this invention of the ‘first computer’, he spent only a brief period of his life working on and with it and his invention was almost completely forgotten until it was rediscovered three centuries later recorded in a sketch preserved between Kepler’s notes.

Schickard began work in 1624 on a territorial survey of Württemberg based on triangulation and his explanatory textbook Kurze Anweisung wie künstliche Landtafeln aus rechtem Grund zu machen earned him a significant reputation as a cartographer.
In 1631, following the death of Michael Mästlin, he was appointed professor of astronomy and mathematics at the University of Tübingen and in this position he developed a lunar theory and worked closely with Pierre Gassendi, who shared with him his observations— predicted by Kepler—of Mercury’s transit across the sun in the same year as his appointment.

Schickard died of the bubonic plague on 23 October 1635 in Tübingen. He was the last member of his immediate family to succumb to the disease, which had been brought into the city in the aftermath of the Battle of Nördlingen.