the curta calculator
In the late 1940s, Hertzstark had filed new patents and eventually found a backer in the Prince of Liechtenstein. The country, where Hertzstark resettled until his death in 1988, was looking to expand its economy and the Prince agreed to help set up a company to build and market the Curta, the Contina AG Mauren, with Hertzstark holding 30 percent o... See more
David Szondy • Curta calculator: The mechanical marvel born in a Nazi death camp
An Interview with Curt Herzstark
Curt Herzstark discusses the history of the Austrian Calculating Machine Manufacturing Company, his father's inventions and the development of the CURTA hand-held calculator.
conservancy.umn.eduinterview w Herzstark
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the (abridged) story of Curt Herzstark, the brilliant Viennese engineer who invented an incredibly complex handheld mechanical calculator in the Buchenwald concentration camp
What's worse was that inside the device each digit of a number was set on a separate register with its own mechanism that had to be repeated up to eight to 10 times. Then to compound the problem, subtraction meant duplicating all these in reverse, plus a special mechanism to handle carrying the number when necessary. No wonder a handheld calculator... See more
David Szondy • Curta calculator: The mechanical marvel born in a Nazi death camp
love how physical everything is - there was a mechanism built specifically to carry a number over
the phrase number crunching comes from how old calculators used to work
"And again and again, wherever one went, competitors came with wonderful, big machines, which were ever more expensive and electric, but something was missing in the world market," said Herzstark in an extensive interview (PDF) conducted by the Charles Babbage Institute in 1987. "'I would like to have a machine that fits into my pocket and can calc... See more
David Szondy • Curta calculator: The mechanical marvel born in a Nazi death camp
"Curious History Pocket Calculator"
The document discusses the history and features of the Curta calculator, an innovative mechanical pocket calculator invented by Curt Herzstark during his time in a concentration camp.
computarium.lcd.lu
Curta adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, square and cube roots, continuous multiplication, negative multiplication, standard deviations and all statistical calculations, squares and higher powers, co-ordinates and associated land survey formulae, and every other computation arising in science and commerce. Available on a trial basis. Price $125.00. Write for literature.
Some relief from tedious manual number crunching came in the 17th century with the invention of logarithms followed by mechanical aids like the slide rule and the first adding machines. Unfortunately, they weren't that much of a help. Slide rules couldn't handle numbers to more than two or three decimal places and, for centuries, calculators were l... See more
David Szondy • Curta calculator: The mechanical marvel born in a Nazi death camp
insane that calculators are actually super recent