The Inventor of the Roulette Wheel

The invention of the Roulette wheel is attributed to a French mathematician, Blaise Pascal. It is said that he invented it in the seventeenth century. In this short article we will look at some of the other inventions of this great man.

Blaise Pascal was a man born before his time. He was not only a great mathematician; he was also a great inventor of many things. One of the things he invented was the Pascaline. In appearance this has several features in common with the Roulette wheel, though in fact it is a calculator, and one of the first calculators to be invented.

Blaise Pascal's father was a tax receiver and as a result was often engaged in arithmetic. Blaise sought to help him by making a machine that would help in the tedious task of adding up and subtracting seemingly endless columns of numbers. The machine was the first mechanical calculator that was able to carry tens and hundreds. The numbers to be processed are set up on a series of discs. The calculation is then performed by cranking a handle. The machine was difficult and expensive to build and was quite controversial in that it threatened the jobs of accountants' clerks. Only fifty were ever built.

Two of his other inventions were the hydraulic press and the syringe. Both inventions were the result of his work on the relationship between pressure and force in hydraulic fluids, and went on to show that there was such a thing as vacuum, something that had been refuted previously.

Pascal devoted much of his mathematic work to probability theory. Much of this work concerned gambling and involved a number of conjectures. One of these was the Problem of the Points. This concerned two dice players in a winner takes all game. The game ends prematurely and the question is how to slit the money fairly; equally was rules out as id disadvantaged to person who was ahead; neither was it fair to give everything to the leader. The fair split would be to calculate each player's possibility of winning. Pascal was able to do that with the mathematic construction known as Pascal's Triangle.

Pascal demonstrated that the odds of winning a game of chance such as roulette could be calculated mathematically. It is amazing that no one had done this before him.