The hand-cranked Curta mechanical calculator (2021)

Ever since reading William Gibson's /Pattern Recognition/ I've wanted to own one of these. I inherited a much less sophisticated mechanical calculator from my grandfather. It is a flat rectangle that has slots cut in to both sides, about the size of an A5 sheet of paper. One side is addition and the opposite is subtraction. A clever use of space, but not half as clever as a Curta.

When I first was invited up to my now-wife's apartment 11 years ago and saw a Curta - which was sitting on top of her operating NeXTCube - I knew I'd hit the jackpot.

I’ve got one, in pristine condition no less. Using it is satisfying in a way that is very hard for me to bring across in text. You can feel the mechanism when turning the crank, and it feels very “intricate, but not fragile”. It clicks and burrs just in the right way.

I have once or twice used it for simple calculations in some special context for fun (calculating salary related stuff after a raise or something like that), but obviously it’s much quicker to just enter that into a modern calculator or computer.

It’s a marvelous piece of art now, basically.

Adam Savage, of Mythbusters-fame, has one of these - and loves it dearly. He had the opportunity to have it CT scanned, to show its inner workings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n564Cw0lHLk

For context, the pre-existing larger mechanical calculators such as the 1936 Facit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRGu1OBFPrc

I saw one of these still in use before the takeover by electronic calculators in the 1970s. I think it was replaced by a TI-58, which was programmable and was supplied by a manufacturer with several magnetic program cards for the specific field of use (industrial lab).

P.S. text and photos of the Facit: https://mechanicalcalculators.wordpress.com/about/facit-calc...

It's weird that for that many made they still fetch pretty penny on ebay

I have one of these, inherited from my dad who was a physicist working as an engineer. I frankly have no idea how it works, but I fondly recall my dad using it before he got a calculator in the 80s

I wonder what he would have thought of the people 3-d printing Curta-alikes a decade ago.

I remember seeing one whipped out during my university days in the 60s.

Awesome little thing.