When I was in high school (in the mid '60s), there were no electronic calculators. We did our math either by longhand (which I’m still fairly competent at) or with slide rules. As I was very interested in electronics, practical mathematics (algebra, trigonometry, and simple calculus) was an essential skill. I got fairly good at using a slide rule (more on that another day), but Dr. Brown (my high school physics teacher) had something even better for many purposes: a Curta mechanical calculator. He let me use it a few times, and I just loved it — but its cost was way over anything I could imagine my parents buying for me (a couple hundred dollars, as I recall), so I never even mentioned it to them.
The Curta was almost magical — it could add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers with up to 8 digits of precision (and answers to 14 digits). It used no batteries, and had no motors or electronics. The Curta worked through dozens and dozens of mechanical parts interacting in a complex way. You could hold it in one hand easily, working it with the other — and with a little practice, you could calculate far more accurately than is possible on a slide rule, and darned near as fast.
Oh, how I wanted a Curta.
Now I have one, thanks to a winning bid on eBay. Of course it doesn’t hold a candle to today’s miraculous calculators (not to mention personal computers). But it is still a marvelous little gadget, a testament to Curt Herzstark’s mechanical engineer genius. And it’s fun to use it! Just for fun, I will divide 48772.33 by 4.5538848 … and the answer (which took me 53 seconds to compute) is: 10710.049. Of course I confirmed that answer in about 5 seconds on Windows Calculator (and got a more precise answer), but that’s not the point!
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