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This is the earliest music instrument found. This flute is made from mammoth ivory. The flute was found by Professor Tom Higham at Geissenkloesterle Cave in Germany’s Swabian Jura.
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The prolific Greek mathematician, Archimedes described the lever. Levers are a fundamental tool that was used by prehistoric humans.
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The Greek engineer, Ktesibios, discovered how one person could play a large set of pipes without needing to blow air through them one at a time. Greeks and Romans loved the hydraulis and it had a tremendous impact in the musical world for centuries. One thousand years passed before the hydraulic was replaced by more powerful and mechanically complex instruments.
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This early mechanical musical instrument invented by the Banū Musā brothers in Baghdad, Iraq. This music box was a hydropower organ that played interchangeable encoded cylinders automatically.
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Jacques de Vaucanson’s The Flute Player is the first automaton and the first to perform a series of mechanical actions that were sufficiently complex to portray a credible imitation of life. This invention contained an encoded cylinder that played the music and guided the figure’s movements.
In 1745, Vaucanson designed a loom with an encoded cylinder. However, instead of each encoded pin paired with a music note, he paired it to a particular colored thread of fabric. -
Improving on Vaucanson’s encoded cylinder loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard used punched cards that controlled the loom. The use of punched cards allowed the automatic production of an infinite variety of woven patterns.
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The Italian inventor Pellegrino Turri created the writing machine for his blind friend, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano.
Years later, the Sholes & Gidden Type Writer (1873) was very influential and popular. It used the QWERTY keyboard arrangement used today. This design separated frequently used letter combinations as a method of avoiding type bar jams. -
Computer pioneer, Charles Babbage’s (1791-1871) analytical engine marks the leap from the mechanized arithmetic of calculating to fully-realized general-purpose computation. Programmable punched cards borrowed from Jacquard’s loom performed the arithmetic processing. Punched cards were so effective that they remained in use until the 1970s.
