The first adding machine, a precursor of the digital computer, was in 1642 by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. This employed a series of ten-toothed wheels, each tooth representing a digit from 0 to . The wheels were connected so that numbers could be to each other by advancing the wheels by a correct number of teeth. In the 1670s the German philosopher and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz improved on this machine by devising one that could also .
The French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard, in designing an automatic loom, used thin, perforated boards to control the weaving of complicated designs. During the 1880s the American statistician Herman Hollerith the idea of using perforated cards, similar to Jacquard's boards, for processing data. Employing a system that punched cards over electrical contacts, he was able to statistical information for the 1890 United States census.