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.
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.
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.
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.