who invented the first gear driven calculating machine
Mechanical calculator Surviving notes from Wilhelm Schickard in 1623 reveal that he designed and had built the earliest of the modern attempts at mechanizing calculation. His machine was composed of two sets of technologies: first an abacus made of Napier's bones, to simplify multiplications and divisions first described six years earlier in 1617, and for the mechanical part, it had a dialed pedometer to perform additions and subtractions. A study of the surviving notes shows a machine that would have jammed after a few entries on the same dial,[1] and that it could be damaged if a carry had to be propagated over a few digits (like adding 1 to 999).[2] Schickard abandoned his project in 1624 and never mentioned it again until his death eleven years later in 1635.
Automatic transmission The automatic transmission was invented in 1921 by Alfred Horner Munro of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, and patented under Canadian patent CA 235757 in 1923. (Munro obtained UK patent GB215669 215,669 for his invention in 1924 and US patent 1,613,525 on 4 January 1927). Being a steam engineer, Munro designed his device to use compressed air rather than hydraulic fluid, and so it lacked power and never found commercial application.[1] The first automatic transmission using hydraulic fluid may have been developed in 1932 by two Brazilian engineers, JosÃ© Braz Araripe and Fernando Lehly Lemos; subsequently the prototype and plans were sold to General Motors who introduced it in the 1940 Oldsmobile as the "Hydra-Matic" transmission.[2] They were incorporated into GM-built tanks during World War II and, after the war, GM marketed them as being "battle-tested."[citation needed] However, a Wall Street Journal article credits ZF Friedrichshafen with the invention, occurring shortly after World War I. ZF's origins were in manufacturing gears for airship engines beginning in 1915; the company was founded by Ferdinand von Zeppelin.[3]