Curt Herzstark bio

respect my paternal grandmother above everyone. She was widowed in 1872 and was the daughter of a doctor. In order to support herself she took on the profession of a midwife. I think, that she did have a university degree. She was a woman who knew life with all of its good and bad sides. I was in her care until her death, until I was nine years old... See more

So

I went first to school and then to the Middle School and then High School. In High School, I took Latin and English. As I was finishing up the Lower Middle School, my father said that it did not make sense to finish High School and to waste years studying technology there. Because, what was taught in our field at that time was uninteresting. A typi... See more

HERZSTARK: Yes, we had our basic four function machines. This machine, our machine, could automatically multiply and divide. But we did not produce large numbers of machines because we did not have the capital. We also had electric machines of which we produced about 10-12 in a month. Then we had the Astra to sell and then, of course, the Multisumm... See more

1/? the (abridged) story of Curt Herzstark, the brilliant Viennese engineer who invented an incredibly complex handheld mechanical calculator in the Buchenwald concentration camp

Calculating machines as experiments have been well-known since 1600, but at that time they were practically museum pieces without practical worth. Because someone tried to build something and one could watch, for 2x2=4 it took exactly three times as long as in your head or it was wrong.

HERZSTARK: The second war... yes, yes. My father had owned, by the way, a movie theater for many years. As

There was a will from 1913 and my parents each left everything to the other partner so that there could be no dispute. This will was still in existence but my mother did not want to use it. Instead she suggested, "You get the factory and your brother Ernst, will get the cinema and I will receive a pension from each of you." That was '37, '38 and we... See more

But in '43 two people from our factory were arrested and one was decapitated. They had listened to English radio stations and transcribed the broadcasts on a typewriter and passed it on. This was discovered because of the typed copy. The typewriter was identified and the owner, he was one of our mechanics, his name was Zur, he was beheaded. The sec... See more