Calculator of the day: the Casio QL-10 Calculighter

It’s out! Empire of the Sum is now available in the US, and to mark the occasion I’ve been posting about a few of my favourite calculators. I’m closing this series for now with perhaps the apotheosis of 1980s calculator design: the 1981 Casio QL-10 Calculighter.

No, wait — hear me out.

Casio QL-10 calculighter, a calculator combined with a cigarette lighter
The Casio QL-10 calculighter, a calculator combined with a cigarette lighter. (CC BY-SA 2.0 image courtesy of Vicente Zorilla Palau.)

If Texas Instruments is the undisputed champion of American calculator makers, Casio rules the roost in Japan and much of the rest of the world besides.* Casio was also the first calculator manufacturer to make a purely electrical calculator — that is, one that did not rely on mechanical gear trains to record and calculate — in the form of the relay-driven 14-A.

But the 14-A was not Casio’s first product. That honour goes to the yubiwa pipe: a cigarette holder soldered onto a simple finger ring, so that smokers could have a puff at work, at the onsen baths, or anywhere else they pleased, all while keeping their hands free at the same time. The success of the yubiwa pipe gave Casio’s founders, the four brothers Kashio, the financial breathing room they needed to broaden their product line.

After a series of false starts, the desk-sized 14-A made its debut in 1957. Capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, it was a brash announcement of Casio’s entry into the world of automatic computing and calculating, and it was eagerly taken up by both academic and commercial customers. Another relay calculator followed, but the company never quite recaptured the 14-A’s magic, and, within a decade, Casio had lost its lead to the many transistorised calculators now being made outside Japan. (By their own admission, the Kashios had spent too much time on the golf course and not enough time in the boardroom.)

In time, though, Casio fought its way back to the top. It released calculators like 1972’s cheap, robust Casio Mini. Others, like the fx-10 of 1974, put scientific functions in an affordable package. And 1978’s Mini Card, barely larger than a credit card, pushed the boundaries of miniaturisation. By the 1980s, lightheaded with success, Casio proceeded to build a series of calculator-plus-literally-anything-else hybrids to fill ever smaller niches: there was the VL-80 calculator/synthesiser; the CQ-1 calculator/clock; the ST-1 calculator/stopwatch; the RC-1000 calculator/clock/radio; the fx-190 calculator/ruler; the MG-880 calculator/synth/videogame; and so on, almost ad infinitum.

And then, of course, there was the QL-10 Calculighter, a calculator combined with a cigarette lighter. Had this been any other calculator company, it would be have been entirely possible to deride the QL-10 as ’80s excess gone mad. But Casio alone could claim method in its madness, because it had got started not with electronic instruments, as had Hewlett-Packard; nor with geophysical surveying equipment, like Texas Instruments; nor cameras, like Canon; but rather, with the humble yubiwa cigarette holder. For Casio, the QL-10 was a homecoming.

Thanks for reading this series! I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and if you’d like to read more about the history of calculators, pocket and otherwise, this post will help you order a copy of Empire of the Sum.

If you’d like to hear more about the history of the pocket calculator first, have a listen to my chat with Dallas Campbell on the history of digital calculators. And if you’d like to win a copy of Empire, check out the giveaway for US readers!

*
There’s an argument that says TI owes its US crown at least in part to employing the right lobbyists, but that’s another story. ↢

We have winners – and a new competition!

Congratulations to Mary Ann Atwood and John W. Stuart, winners of the first round of the Empire of the Sum giveaway! Their names were picked at random from the set of all entrants who replied the original post about the competition.* Thank you all for entering! If you won, congratulations, and look out for an email from me arranging delivery of your copy of Empire. If not, read on.

The sun rises behind a pocket calculator, whose display reads "07734"
The cover of Empire of the Sum.

Here is another chance to win one of two free copies of Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator! To enter, leave a comment on this post with a valid email address so that I can contact you in the event that you win.

One caveat: this second round will be the last one for US residents only. There will be two additional 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 3rd September 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.

Read more →

*
In more detail: I arranged the names of all entrants in a text file, then used random.org to pick two numbers between 1 and the total number of lines in that file. ↢

Calculator of the day: the HP-35

It’s out! Empire of the Sum is now available in the US, and to mark the occasion I’m posting about a few of my favourite calculators. Today’s is the Hewlett-Packard HP-35, a scientific calculator that today looks quite unremarkable — and yet which, at the time, was revelatory.

Hewlett-Packard HP-35
A well-used Hewlett-Packard HP-35, as many of them were. (CC BY 4.0 image courtesy of the Flygvapenmuseum.)

Depending on the reader’s age, the name “Hewlett-Packard” may evoke calculators, desktop computers or printers. (Or, maybe, nothing at all.) But for the first few decades of the company’s existence, it specialised in electronic “instruments” such as the oscilloscopes, signal generators and other tools that an engineer might use to design or test an electrical or electronic circuit. Conceived by HP’s co-founder, Bill Hewlett, the HP-35 was to be the company’s route out of that niche and into a wider world of consumer electronics.

The thing about the HP-35 is this: unlike many other calculators at the time, no part of it was truly without precedent. Scientific calculators were not new, although they were sized for desks rather than pockets (and nor had anyone thought to market them to consumers rather than engineers). Integrated chips were not new, although they were rarely as complex as those in the HP-35. LED displays were not new, but they were very expensive and not often seen in calculators. What the HP-35 did do that no other device had managed before was to bring all these things together into a package that was portable, powerful, and, crucially, aesthetically pleasing.

HP’s first pocket calculator turned out to be a smash hit. Sold at Macy’s and advertised in Esquire, the HP-35 had an appeal far beyond mathematicians and scientists, and the company could barely keep up with demand. Students sold their cars to buy them. NASA engineers had to lock theirs away to stop them from going walkabout. US army math instructors devised a new course as an excuse to buy HP-35s on expenses. And HP never looked back: the company that had once built engineering gadgets for engineers now aimed its products at the public at large. Some observers, in fact, credit the HP-35 with inaugurating the whole category of consumer electronics; your iPhone, tablet or laptop computer may never have come about without it.

A big thank you to Jim Hughes at Codex99, whose article was the catalyst for my chapter on the HP-35. His writing is excellent, and his site is well worth a moment of your time.

If you’d like to order a copy of Empire of the Sum, this post will point you in the right direction. And if you’d like to hear more about the history of the pocket calculator first, have a listen to my chat with Dallas Campbell on the history of digital calculators.

Empire of the Sum extracted in Lapham’s Quarterly

U.S. Census Bureau staff using Hollerith electrical tabulator
U.S. Census Bureau staff using Hollerith electrical tabulator. (Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

If you’d like to get a flavour of Empire of the Sum, check out this extract in Lapham’s Quarterly! It’s taken from the first chapter of the book, and, spoiler alert, it has nothing to do with the image (above) they’ve chosen to illustrate it — although Hollerith’s machines do make an appearance later in the book, and, coincidentally enough, I wrote about them a few years back in the context of the Monotype machine. Everything old is new again!