High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Step Reckoner (or Stepped Reckoner) was a digital mechanical calculator invented by German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz around 1672 and completed 1694. The name comes from the translation of the German term for its operating mechanism; staffelwalze meaning 'stepped drum'. It was the first calculator that could perform all four arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Its intricate precision gearwork, however, was somewhat beyond the fabrication technology of the time; mechanical problems, in addition to a design flaw in the carry mechanism, prevented the machines from working reliably.