There are many people to thank for helping make this happen: my agent Laurie Abkemeier; Brendan Curry, Caroline Adams, and Anna Oler at W. W. Norton; Judith Abbate for design; and Rachelle Mandik for copyediting. And of course, my wife Leigh helped out at every stage — she has read Empire cover to cover many times over by now, and it’s all the better for it.
I hope you enjoy the book, and please let me know what you think!
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For readers in the rest of the world, the book will be published in October. ↢
My new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, will be published in the US tomorrow (‼️), the 22nd of August, and to mark the occasion I thought I’d post about some of my favourite calculators. Today, we’re looking at a calculator used by a remarkable person indeed: the late Katherine Johnson, a “human computer” and mathematician at NASA’s laboratory in Langley, Virginia.
Katherine G. Johnson at work. (Image by Bob Nye at NASA.)
Johnson joined NASA — or rather NACA, as it was, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — at a time when segregation was still a fact of life. Her workplace, the West Area Computing section, was composed entirely of Black Americans. Yet Johnson would become an important figure in NASA history. Not only did she author or co-author a number of influential papers, but she was also John Glenn’s first port of call when the astronaut’s anxiety about NASA’s novel electronic computers got the better of him. Not fully trusting the machines with which his flight path had been calculated, Glenn asked for Johnson to re-run the computations on her desktop calculator. She did so, he was mollified, and the flight was a success, putting the USA back into contention in the ongoing space race.
A point of pedantry: the image here shows Johnson working at a desk bearing a MonroMatic 8N-213, although contemporary sources say her work on Glenn’s orbital trajectory was done on a Friden STW-10. That’s the calculator I talk about in the book, but really, the two machines are very similar — both were electrically-driven versions of more traditional mechanical calculators, and both worked on similar principles. But this is rather to miss the point: Johnson herself is the star of this particular story. Margot Lee Shetterly’s book, Hidden Figures, is a good place to learn more about Johnson’s life and work, which extended far beyond the Mercury program and Glenn’s part of it.
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.
The Curta is noteworthy for two reasons. One is that it was the first practical pocket calculator, being as it was a miniaturised version of an existing mechanical calculator called the arithmometer. (The arithmometer, in turn, had its roots in a mechanism called the “Leibniz wheel”, an invention of the prolific but unlikeable Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. This seventeenth-century German polymath was allegedly so unpopular that his funeral was attended only by his secretary.) With a Curta, a practiced user could add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers by adjusting a few sliders and then turning the crank on top. The answer then appeared in a set of displays arrayed around the top of the device.
It’s possible to be simultaneously entranced by the Curta’s mechanical cleverness and sobered by the circumstances of its creation. That’s because the second reason for the Curta’s prominence is that it was designed in a Nazi concentration camp. Curt Herzstark, its inventor, thinking it his only way out, designed the Curta to appease his captors — and, after the liberation of the notorious Buchenwald camp in which he was imprisoned, found his way to the tiny principality of Liechtenstein to see his blueprints put into production.
Perhaps alone among the calculators I write about in Empire of the Sum, the Curta melds tragedy and triumph in a single artefact. Herzstark’s tenacity in the face of one of the great atrocities of our time, and the ingenuity of the calculator that resulted, are equally worthy of note.
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.
Today, it’s first things first. Well, not exactly, since I am rudely omitting hands, feet, genitals, pebbles, sticks, counting tokens and abacuses from this list of portable calculating devices. But today’s calculator is, at any rate, the oldest one that I’ll be writing about this week. Enter the slide rule.
Slide rule owned by Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. (CC0 image courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum.)
For the uninitiated, slide rules are analog mechanical calculators, like the one shown above. They’re similar to normal rulers but with two main distinctions: they have a number of specialised scales (usually four at a minimum, but often many more) that encode different mathematical operations; and they have a movable slide that allows their scales to be aligned as necessary to carry out those operations.
I had a lot of fun digging into the slide rule’s history. It was invented by a sixteenth-century mathematician and Anglican minister named William Oughtred, who, ironically, was avowedly against using anything other than good old fashioned brain power when it came to working through mathematical problems. He once proclaimed that devices that simplified mathematical operations turned their users into “doers of tricks, and as it were Iuglers [jugglers].”
Oughtred had the insight to line up a pair of what were called “Gunter scales”, or logarithmic rulers, to make it easy to multiply any two numbers together to at least a few significant figures of precision — a job that had been, until that time, a frustratingly manual process. In turn, Gunter scales were based on the concept of logarithms, as devised by John Napier of Edinburgh, an alchemist, astrologer, religious polemicist, and occasional mathematician. Edinburgh’s Napier University is named after him.
Courtesy of my father in law, who has indefatiguably trawled the antique stores of the American Midwest, I am now the proud owner of a number of vintage slide rules. Not the one shown above — that one belonged to Sally Ride, the first American woman in space — but a respectable selection nonetheless of rules covering the gamut from the classroom to the engineering laboratory. Slide rules are deceptively simple things, and they are intensely satisfying to get to grips with. If you aren’t familiar with them, head over to eBay to see what you can find. A piece of mathematical magic can be yours for as little as a few pounds.
One caveat: this first round is for US residents only. There will be another round for US residents after US publication and two rounds for non-US residents closer to publication time in the rest of the world. To make sure you don’t miss those future contests, you might want to subscribe to the Shady Characters newsletter using the link at the bottom of the page.
The contest will close at noon UK time on Sunday 20th August 2023, so make sure you enter before then. After that I’ll pick two winners from the list of all unique entrants, and I’ll get in touch to arrange free postage of your prize. See below for terms and conditions, and good luck!
Update: The competition is now closed! I’ll announce the winners soon.
