A chemical balance is standard equipment in any chemistry or physics laboratory, but in this electronic age a balance using weights is as odd as a slide rule. Weighing devices made their appearance at the time when human societies started to take root; the early devices were mechanical and developed very slowly until the seventeenth or eighteenth century when science started to set its principles. The next two centuries saw the mechanical balance achieve its final shape until its replacement by electronic devices in the second part of the twentieth century. Here, the history of the development of the balance since the dawn of history until its final mechanical form in the second half of the nineteenth century is being traced.