One of the World’s Oldest Calculators Was Up for Auction. Then, Scientists Rallied and Temporarily Blocked Its Sale

French scholars argued that the 17th-century Pascaline should go to a public collection and stay within the country. But a Paris court may take months to make a final decision on the device’s fate

Margherita Bassi | Daily Correspondent

November 24, 2025

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

In 1642, a teenage French scholar named Blaise Pascal invented what many regard as the world’s first mechanical calculator: the Pascaline.

Almost four centuries later, one of these famous instruments was scheduled for sale in Paris on November 19 by Christie’s auction house, which expected the calculator to fetch between about $2.3 million and $3.5 million.

But the sale was suspended in the wake of an opinion article published in Le Monde by a group of scientists earlier this month. The researchers argued the artifact should not go to auction—and should not be exported to a buyer outside the country—without first giving French public institutions time to prepare a bid.

“What a sad admission of disinterest in our scientific heritage,” the scientists wrote for Le Monde, as translated by the Guardian’s Jon Henley. “What a misunderstanding of Pascal, engineer, mathematician, philosopher, writer, a personality like no other, whose 400th birth anniversary we celebrated in 2023.”

Eugenia Cheng, a mathematician and scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, told NPR’s Ailsa Chang when the sale was announced in September that Pascalines are more akin to bicycles than modern-day calculators, because you can see the machine working. A user enters numbers into the device with dials akin to those on rotary phones.

Pascal invented three calculating machines to help his father reorganize Normandy’s tax revenues, according to a Christie’s statement. One device was for basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division; another for accounting; and the last for calculating distances for surveying land. At the time, some people worried that Pascalines might take their jobs, similar to modern fears about artificial intelligence, per the London Times’ David Chazan.

“I love the idea that Pascal, at the age of 19, was just bored of doing the arithmetic for his dad at work,” Cheng told NPR. “He said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’—just like any teenager would and should—and went, ‘I’m going to make a machine instead that will do it for me.’”

Only nine original Pascalines have survived to this day, according to a Christie’s statement, although Pascal built around 20 finished calculators during his lifetime. The Pascaline in question is the only known example for calculating distances, as well as the only one that’s currently privately owned, per the auction house.

What’s more, the 17th-century calculator is fully functional, and Christie’s describes it as “the most important scientific instrument ever offered at auction.”

The scientists writing for Le Monde argue that even though five Pascalines are already in public collections in France, each one is unique, so the state should, “without a shadow of a doubt,” preserve this example in a public collection so that it can be studied by the international scientific community, per a translation by Smithsonian magazine. They conclude by urgently asking the country’s government to consider revoking permission it had granted that would have allowed the device to leave France.

The culture ministry tells Agence France-Presse (AFP) that it provided the export certificate in May after gaining approval from two experts, one from the National Center of Arts and Crafts and another from the Louvre Museum.

In a statement published November 18, the Administrative Court of Paris announced that a judge had provisionally revoked that certificate. “Given its historical and scientific value, La Pascaline is likely to be classified as a ‘national treasure,’” the court said, per the Guardian.

“Pending the final judgment, given the provisional nature of this decision and in accordance with the instructions of its client, Christie’s is suspending the sale of La Pascaline,” Christie’s tells AFP.

The historic calculator’s fate is still in limbo, according to the news agency, as the court may take several months to make a final ruling.

Margherita Bassi | Read More

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.