The history of the calculator

Article Category: Units

If you need an illustration of the accelerating speed of technological change, look no further than
the electronic calculator, that modest little device that does the most complex sum instantly and
that you hold in the palm of your hand.
Or more likely dont any more for the pocket calculator, which took more than four millennia
to evolve and only reached its current form in the 1990s, is already obsolescent, if not actually
obsolete.
The history of the calculator is split into two pages and has four main chapters:
1. Beginnings: The Mechanical Age
2. Business Calculator: The Electronic Age
3. Pocket Calculator: The Microchip Age
4. Calculators Now: The Virtual Age
Beginnings: The Mechanical Age

The Abacus: Bean counters friend
In the very beginning, of course was the abacus, a sort of hand operated mechanical calculator
using beads on rods, first used by Sumerians and Egyptians around 2000 BC.
The principle was simple, a frame holding a series of rods, with ten sliding beads on each. When
all the beads had been slid across the first rod, it was time to move one across on the next,
showing the number of tens, and thence to the next rod, showing hundreds, and so on.
It made addition and subtraction faster and less error-prone and may have led to the term bean
counters for accountants.
But that was where the technology more or less stuck for the next 3,600 years, until the
beginning of the 17th century AD, when the first mechanical calculators began to appear in
Europe. Most notably, the development of logarithms by John Napier allowed Edward Gunter,
William Oughtred and others to develop the slide rule.

The Slide Rule: good enough for Dr. Strangelove
The slide rule is basically a sliding stick (or discs) that uses logarithmic scales to allow rapid
multiplication and division. Slide rules evolved to allow advanced trigonometry and logarithms,
exponentials and square roots.
Even up to the 1980s, knowing how to operate a slide rule was a basic part of mathematics
education for millions of schoolchildren, even though by that time, mechanical and electric
calculating machines were well established. The problem was that these werent portable while
the slide rule fitted into the breast pocket of your button-down shirt.
Real Rocket Scientists used slide rules to send Man to the Moon - a Pickett model N600-ES was
taken on the Apollo 13 moon mission in 1970.
Gears, Wheels and Buttons
The first mechanical calculator appeared in 1642, the creations of French intellectual and
mathematics whizz kid Blaise Pascal as a device that will eventually perform all four arithmetic
operations without relying on human intelligence.
Pascal's machine used geared wheels and could add and subtract two numbers directly and
multiply and divide by repetition. Gottfried Leibniz then spent the best part of his life designing
a four-operation mechanical calculator, based on his ingenious slotted Leibniz wheel, but
ultimately failing to produce a fully operational machine.

The Arithmometer: Soldiered on till 1915
That had to wait until 1820 and the patenting in France of Thomas de Colmars four function
Arithmometer.
This first commercially viable counting machine was manufactured from 1851 to 1915 and
copied by around 20 companies across Europe.
By then, the main tide of innovation had moved across the Atlantic, with the development of
hand cranked adding machines like the Grant Mechanical Calculating Machine of 1877 and,
more famously the P100 Burroughs Adding Machine developed by William Seward Burroughs
in 1886.
This was the first in a line of office calculating machines that made the Burroughs family fortune
and enabled the son, William S. Burroughs, to pursue a career consuming hallucinogenic drugs
and writing subversive novels like The Naked Lunch.

The Comptometer: Press key calculating at last
A further step forward occurred in 1887 when Dorr. E. Felts US-patented key driven
Comptometer took calculating into the push button age. This machine, too, spurred a host of
imitators.
The Curta calculator, which first appeared in 1948, was perhaps the ultimate expression of the
mechanical calculator, so compact that it could, somewhat lumpily, fit into a pocket and capable
of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Machines like this ensured that mechanical calculators dominated 20th century office life all the
way through to the late 1960s. By then, electronics were beginning to take over, as we shall see
in the next part of this series.

Curta calculator: mechanical could be compact
Business Calculator: The Electronic Age
The story of the electronic calculator really begins in the late 1930s as the world began to
prepare for renewed war. To calculate the trigonometry required to drop bombs into a pickle
barrel from 30,000 feet, to hit a 30-knot Japanese warship with a torpedo or to bring down a
diving Stuka with an anti aircraft gun required constantly updated automated solutions.These
were provided respectively by the Sperry-Norden bombsight, the US Navys Torpedo Data
Computer and the Kerrison Predictor AA fire control system.
All were basically mechanical devices using geared wheels and rotating cylinders, but producing
electrical outputs that could be linked to weapon systems.
During the Second World War, the challenges of code-breaking produced the first all-electronic
computer, Colossus. But this was a specialised machine that basically performed exclusive or
(XOR) Boolean algorithms.

ENIAC: less processing power than a non-smart phone.
However, it did this using hundred of thermionic valves as electronic on/off switches, as well as
an electronic display.
The application of this technology to the worlds first general calculating computer had to wait
until 1946 and the construction of the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)
as a completely digital artillery firing table calculator also capable of solving "a large class of
numerical problems", including the four basic arithmetical functions.
ENIAC was 1,000 times faster than electro-mechanical computers and could hold a ten-digit
decimal number in memory. But to do this required 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes,
1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It
weighed around 27 tonnes, took up 1800 square feet of floorspace and consumed as much power
as a small town. Not exactly a desktop solution.
Valve and Tube Calculators
Electronic calculating for the office had to wait on the miniaturisation of valves and the
development of solid state transistors.

ANITA: First desktop all electronic calculator.
The first step was seen in 1961 with the arrival of ANITA (A New Inspiration To
Arithmetic/Accounting). This was the worlds first all-electronic desktop calculator and it was
developed in Britain by Control Systems Ltd., marketed under its Bell Punch and Sumlock
brands.
ANITA used the same push button key layout as the companys mechanical comptometers, but
these were the only moving parts. All the rest was done electronically, using a mix of vacuum
and cold cathode Dekatron counting tubes.
The illuminated 12-place display was provided by Nixie glow discharge tubes. From 1962, two
models were marketed; ANITA Mk. 7 for continental Europe and the Mk. 8 for Britain and the
rest of the world, with the latter soon becoming the only model. These early ANITAs sold for
around 355 ($1,000), equivalent to around 4,800 ($8,000) in todays money.
Nevertheless, as the only electronic desktop calculator available, tens of thousands of ANITAs
were sold worldwide up to 1964, when three new transistorised competitors appeared; the
American Friden 130 series, the Italian IME 84, and the Sharp Compet CS10A from Japan.
Transistor Age Calculators

Friden calculator: First CRT display.
None of these were functionally superior to ANITA, nor cheaper (the Sharp CS10 cost around
$2,500 in 1964) but their all-transistor designs opened the floodgates to a new wave of electronic
calculators.
These came from the likes of Canon, Mathatronics, Olivetti, SCM (Smith-Corona-Marchant),
Sony, Toshiba, and Wang.
Four of these Beatles-era transistorised calculators were especially significant, including
Toshibas "Toscal" BC-1411 calculator, which was remarkable in using an early form of
Random Access Memory (RAM) built from separate circuit boards.

Olivetti: Programma 101: Worlds first PC?
The Olivetti Programma 101 introduced in late 1965 was an elegant machine that won many
industrial design awards. It could read and write to magnetic cards and display results on its
built-in printer.
As a desktop electronic calculating machine that was programmable by non-specialists for
individual use, the Programma 101 could even claim to be the first personal computer.
From behind the Iron Curtain the same year emerged the ELKA 22 designed by Bulgarias
Central Institute for Calculation Technologies and built at the Elektronika factory in Sofia.
Built like a T-64 tank and weighing around 8 kg, this was the first calculator in the world to
include a square root function.

Texas Instruments Cal Tech: shape of things to come. Photo credit: Texas Instruments
All electronic calculators to this point had been bulky and heavy machines, costing more than
many family cars of the period.
However in 1967, Texas Instruments released their landmark "Cal Tech" prototype, a calculator
that could add, multiply, subtract, and divide, and print results to a paper tape while being
compact enough to be held in the hand.
A new chapter in the calculator story was opening...
Continue on to part 2 of our story of the history of the calculator, where we look at the microchip
age and the virtual age.


History and Story Behind Inventions:
Calculator or Adding Machine
About the story behind the invention of the calculator or
adding machine, history and biography of Door Eugene Felt
and William Seward Burroughs invention.
INVENTION: Adding Machine
INVENTOR: Door Eugene Felt, U.S.; William Seward Burroughs, U.S.
YEAR: 1887-1888
HOW INVENTED: Until these 2 years, most accountants and clerks did their calculating with
pencil and ledger. Said Felt, "I knew many accountants could mentally add 4 columns of figures
at a time, so I decided I must beat that in designing my machines." Felt constructed the 1st key-
driven adding-machine model. "It was near Thanksgiving Day of 1884, and I decided to use the
holiday in construction of the wooden model. I went to the grocer's and selected a [macaroni]
box." Using meat skewers for punch keys, staples for key guides, elastic bands for springs, Felt
built his model with a jackknife.
He convinced his employer, Robert Tarrant, to back the invention. In 1887, they became partners
in selling the Comptometer, for 15 years "the only multiple order key-driven calculator on the
market."
While Felt was creating the more accurate machine, Burroughs was inventing the more
marketable one. Burroughs, a mechanic's son who became a mechanic himself, applied for a
patent for his Adding and Listing Machine in 1885, obtained the patent 3 years later. At the age
of 28, he was vice-president of his own American Arithmometer Company, in St. Louis, Mo. In
1899, Burroughs produced 50 adding machines. However, only he and one field salesman could
operate them. The salesman, says A Computer Perspective, "operated his so well that he refused
to sell it, preferring to haul it from saloon to saloon in a wheelbarrow, betting drinks on its
accuracy." Later, when Burroughs invented an automatic device that made his machine readily
usable, he went to the storeroom where the original 50 were kept, took them one by one, and
heaved them out the window.


Calculator
In 1642 Blaise Pascal designed and built a mechanical adding machine. It was the first mechanical
calculator in history.

In an 1822 paper presented to the Royal Astronomical Society, English mathematician Charles Babbage
proposed a difference engine, an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial
functions.

The first successful adding machine in the United States was patented in 1888 by William Seward
Burroughs.

In 1889 Herman Hollerith was issued US patent #395,791 for the 'Art of Applying Statistics' his
punched card calculator.

In 1948 the Curta calculator, a hand-cranked, barrel-shaped calculator small enough to fit in the pocket
and capable of basic calculations was introduced.

The first portable calculator placed on sale by Texas Instruments in 1971 weighed only two and a half
pounds and cost a mere $150.

The first slimline digital pocket calculator was the Sinclair Executive, which was launched in 1972. It cost
about three times the average weekly wage but set the standard.