My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US on Tuesday the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d post about some of my favourite calculators. This time, we’re taking a look at the “math grenade”, as William Gibson calls it in his novel Pattern Recognition — the mechanical, cylindrical, pocketable Curta.
My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US this coming Tuesday, the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d start a series of posts about a few of my favourite calculators.
Towards the end of a very hot May, we spent a week in Narbonne in France. Narbonne is an old Roman town, once called Narbo Martius, that forms one point of a shallow triangle with the medieval walled city of Carcassonne and the bullfighting mecca of Béziers. It’s a nice little place; somewhere between a tourist trap and a working town, with plenty to see and do in and around the local area.
I never meant for the numbering of these posts to have any significance other than to tell them apart, but it’s still gratifying to have hit the century after (checks notes) a mere eleven years and six-ish months. For reference, here’s the first ever miscellany post, published way back in November 2011. Amusingly, it is unnumbered. Who’d have thought I’d have needed more than a single post to tie up some loose ends?
I very much enjoyed recording this podcast on the history of books with Dallas Campbell. I haven’t even heard it myself yet – why not have a listen and let me know what you think?