Amazing Old Calculator (Curta) - Numberphile

this is the CTA which is the only mechanical pocket digital calculator ever invented it was invented by Kurt Hutto who's an Austrian engineer who had the idea in the 1930s because for the previous 300 years there had been this this Desire by people to mechanize calculating because calculating is quite effortful it's quite difficult wouldn't be great machines could do it for us and the first person to have this idea was Pascal about 1650 who invented the pascaline and then liet invented his um step reckoner and etc etc etc by the Victorian age there were these big desk calculators where you know that's where the phrase number crunching comes from people would do these complicated multiplications not complicated just long multiplications using machines um but there was always the dream to try and make it a bit more user friendly to make a pocket sized one but the challenge was to get the right kind of engineering and Kurt herstar in their 1930s thought he'd found a way but it took him another 20 years to develop it and one of the problems was that uh the second world war happened he was half Jewish living in Austria so he was imprisoned in the concentration camp but because he was quite a well-known engineer the Nazis said we won't kill you we'll let you develop your pocket Cal mechanical calculator which he did they didn't kill him and I'm not sure if he hadn't got there yet or if he had got there yet but didn't want to tell his Nazi um capts because very shortly after the war when he was liberated he worked out how to do it and he tried to you know gain uh get some investment but it's quite difficult getting investment for what essentially an executive tie and it was only in lonstein and the Dutch of lonstein that he that the royal family there invested in him and in the 1960s 50s and 60s about 100,000 of these cters were made and they were very kind of they're now collected items and I'm going to show you exactly how they work you put the number down here your input number so what if I put I put there 68 and when you turn this around it will add whatever number is here on the sides to here where the output number comes so I put it to 68 I'm going to turn this around and you can see it goes to 68 there if I turn it around again it adds another 68 and another 68 and another 68 and we can keep on going and now I've done it five times so 5 * 68 is 340 because you might forget how many times you've been turning it around there's a marker here five which reminds me that I've done it around um put it around five times so so it goes on to six 7 so 7 * 68 is 476 you can do a whole lot more than that let's multiply by a two-digit number so well firstly let's zero it which is quite a good fun zeroing it you just pull it up and turn that around it's now completely zeroed that's like the clear button on calculator is it exactly it's the C then you put this put these ones to top so let's say we want to do say 24 * 33 let's put 24 here 2 and then four so 33 33 we need to multiply three times 1 2 3 and then the clever thing now is that we move it from units to tens and we do another three times one 2 three so we have multiplied It 33 times three units three on the 10th and the answer is 792 it's a be it's beautiful machine I mean this is um older than me it's um you know 50 years old it looks brand new it's sturdy and tough and what was kind of interesting about it is that in the 60s it was a toy essentially of rally drivers and they co-pilots because often when you're R driving there lots of calculations you need to do about speeds fuels distances but if you had a slide R you'd be slipping all over the place whereas with this you could do this and do the proper calculations you know exactly and uh you're never going to slip and it's you know it's it's just it's like an absolutely beautiful thing it was of the Zenith of the dream of mechanizing calculation it was of the end of the road it was sort of the most perfect and beautiful mechanized calculator and then what happened a few years later you know overtaken by electronic calculation and Cal calculators so this was as far as it got along the road of mechanized calculation I bought this on eBay you can get them for about 500 quid although hopefully now it cost a little bit more so it's it's also an investment let's say we want to do I'll just pull these numbers what's this this is 3,242 333 and just say I want to multiply this by 678 I will go8 three four five 6 78 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 so 678 times 3,242 333 is 2 billion 198 million 301,000 774 nice one what were those little silver things you moved around then at the end well these things here are just where you would put the commas just to remind me literally like the commas that's that's all it is every number files favorite tie