Giovanni Poleni [SEP] place of birth
Giovanni Poleni
Giovanni Poleni (b. Venice, around 1683; d. Padua, Nov., 1761) was a Marquess, physicist, mathematician and antiquarian.
He was the son of Marquess Jacopo Poleni and studied the classics, philosophy, theology, mathematics, and physics at the School of the Padri Somaschi, Venice. He was appointed, at the age of twenty-five, professor of astronomy at Padua. In 1715 he was assigned to the chair of physics, and in 1719 he succeeded Nicholas II Bernoulli as professor
, which, when coupled to a sliding counting wheel, can mesh with a variable number of teeth, seems to have been his way of implementing a variable number of teeth design.
- - Giovanni Poleni was the first to build a calculator that used a pinwheel design. Made of wood, his "calculating clock" was built in 1709; he destroyed it after hearing that Antonius Braun had received 10,000 Guldens for dedicating a pinwheel machine of his own design to the emperor Charles VI of Vienna. Poleni described his machine