No Little Man Required

Posted on March 31, 2004 in Crosstalk Fact-Dropping

Stu Savory wrote a fascinating piece about the 1769 Chess Turk, a machine which appeared to be able to defeat great minds such as Napoleon, Benjarmin Franklin, the Holy Roman Empress, and Edgar Allan Poe. Read his article and follow the links for the details of this mechanical marvel that sounded too good to be true.

I just got off the toilet after spending a good half hour reading the story of the first handheld calculator — entirely mechanical. The crank-operated Curta was designed in Buchenwald by Curt Herzstark, the child of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. A former competitor recognized Herzstark and told the camp commandant of the great prize he’d gleaned. The camp commander had heard of Herzstark’s work on developing a small calculating machine from the old rival. He pulled Herzstark aside:

“I understand you’ve been working on a new thing, a small calculating machine. I’ll give you a tip. We will allow you to make and draw everything. If it really functions, we will give it to the Fuhrer as a present after we win the war. Then, surely, you will be made an Aryan.”


“My God!” [Herzstark] thought to [himself]….”If I can make this calculator, I can extend my life.” Right there [he] started to draw the calculator, as [he] had imagined it.

The rest of the story appears in the January 2004 issue of Scientific American. (You can buy a copy of Cliff Stoll’s article here.) There are enough of these pocket calculators (first made in 1947) to have a fan club. Here are a few links:

• The Curta Calculator Page
  
• The Curta Simulator (unfortunately, comes without instructions on how to use the thing)
  
• You can get a manual here
  
• Other blogs which talked about the Curta Calculator

You can easily get lost in these pages which describe the amazing story of the first pocket calculator, a machine that resembled a cross between a pepper mill and a Nikon lense. And no chips, no transistors, no vacuum tubes, and no little man hiding inside to fake the miracle. This machine did the job with gears, cranks, and human fingers to feed it the data.