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!
It’s out! Empire of the Sum was published yesterday in the US, and to mark the occasion I’m posting about a few of my favourite calculators. Today we’re taking a look at the Canon Pocketronic, a machine with a decent claim to being the first ever pocket electronic calculator.
The Pocketronic was both an imposter and a failure. It started life as the “Cal Tech”, a prototype calculator designed by Texas Instruments as a means to sell microchips to the average person on the street. The problem was that TI was not, at first, very good at making those chips. Despite having pioneered the integrated circuit, the Cal Tech’s chips were so complex that the company could not reliably produce them en masse. Another problem was that the usual calculator display mechanisms were inimical to the Cal Tech’s hoped-for pocketable form factor: LEDs were too power hungry, and so-called Nixie tubes — lightbulbs, essentially, with filaments twisted into the shape of numerals — were too large. In their place, TI put a reliable but obsolescent printing mechanism. This was a calculator that could run out of batteries and paper.
TI had never meant to build the Cal Tech itself, and so, years later, when it had solved its production issues, it handed the design to Canon for refinement into a more consumer-friendly device. The Pocketronic was born, considerably later than intended and so bulky that the “pocket” part of its name was as much an aspiration as a statement of fact. It was never the success that TI had hoped, and yet it gave the company a taste of a calculator market that only promised to grow and grow.
By and by, TI worked the kinks out of its manufacturing processes and, eventually, started to make calculators in house. A decade or so later and it was one of the largest calculator manufacturers in the world. And as any US schoolchild will tell you, it still is today.
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.
It’s publication day! Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator is published today in the USA.* You can order a copy from from Norton, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson, IndieBound, Powell’s, Target or Walmart.
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!
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.
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.
If you’d like to pre-order a copy of Empire of the Sum, this post will point you in the right direction. Today is also the last chance for American readers to enter a competition to win one of two copies! Visit this post to find out more.
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.
If you’d like to pre-order a copy of Empire of the Sum, this post will point you in the right direction. And don’t forget that American readers can enter a competition to win one of two copies! Visit this post to find out more.