Pascaline from De la Collection Léon Parcé | Christie's Paris

I'm delighted to present this little wonder to you, which I think you know. The Pascaline, the beloved child of Blaise Pascal. It's moving to have it here in front of me. But above all, it's much more than just a machine. It's emblematic of a whole section of the history of humanity. And I'm not exaggerating. Pascal was only 22 years old when he first presented to the powerful of the time this little baby on which he had been working for three years. It's no more, no less than the first personal machine in the history of humanity. Inside, fundamental technical innovations. First of all, inside, a very clever gear system, designed on the one hand so that even if the gesture of the hand is imprecise, it falls very precisely. But also a very nice jump mechanism for holding them, which will later be admired by editors of the Diderot Encyclopedia. It's a clockwork mechanism. Here, the mechanism that allows you to go from addition to subtraction. And here we see, on a modern machine in a metric system, it would be the units, the tens, the hundreds. Now we're on the so-called sowing machine. Each was a unique piece. Others were graduated differently. It depends on what you want to measure. And we can also see these little spikes on Pascal's lamb, the family's weapons. Could you also tell us a little bit about the technological extension that this machine has generated? This machine will inspire the rest. The next step is Leibniz, a disciple of Pascal in several respects, who invents a very clever pinion, a kind of helicoidal structure that allows you to do multiplications. Really native. Then come the mechanics of the time of the British Industrial Revolution. British and French. So, Jacquard on the French side and Babbage on the British side. And Ada Lovelace, who is not only the first to resonate in terms of programming language, but also has a vision of what computer science will allow to do, Pascal, at the time of the presentation of this machine to the Chancellor Seguet, wrote a letter to the reader, which is a rather fascinating document, which looks like an entrepreneur's alphabet. Yes, you know, when I reread all of Pascal's scientific and technical texts to prepare the celebrations of his 400 years, it was this text that I did not know, which fascinated me the most. What you have to understand is that Pascal prepared this project as a scientist, a mathematician above all, of course, but also as an engineer, but also as an entrepreneur. And he launched himself in all the codes of the tech entrepreneur well before his time, with staggering prospects. He did all the tricks of the trade that were needed to obtain a royal privilege. No one had the right to market a computer in France if it was not signed Blaise Pascal. The patent of the time. The patent of the time, which makes Pascal the first tech entrepreneur in the history of the world. The 17th century Steve Jobs was Blaise Pascal. What is tasty is that it was the only failure of the living Pascal, because it did not work as a commercial company. It was too expensive, but a triumph from the point of view of technique and ideas and posterity. A commentator, I think it was Chateaubriand, speaks of this way that Pascal had to animate the bronze and to give the spirit to the air. A beautiful formula that illustrates this dream, this dialectic, if I may say, between thought and the physical world. To have it here, embodied in this beautiful object, isolated patiently and in which there were so many dreams, I find it very moving.