Amazing Old Calculator (Curta) - Numberphile
Alex's book: http://amzn.to/1l0yX46 The Curta is a pocket-sized, mechanical, digital calculator!!! It was invented by Curt Herzstark. More links & stuff in full description below ↓↓↓...
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ALEX BELLOS: This is the Curta, which is the onlymechanical pocket digital calculator ever invented.It was invented by Curt Herzstark, who's an Austrianengineer who had the idea in the 1930s.Because for the previous 300 years, there'd been thisdesire for people to mechanize calculating, becausecalculating was quite effortful.It was quite difficult.Wouldn't it be great if machines could do it for us?And the first person to have this idea was Pascal in about1650, who invented the Pascaline.And then Leibniz invented his Step Reckoner, and et cetera,et cetera, et cetera.By the Victorian Age, there were these big deskcalculators, where that's where the phrase "numbercrunching" comes from.People would do these complicated multi...
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ALEX BELLOS: This is the Curta, which is the onlymechanical pocket digital calculator ever invented.It was invented by Curt Herzstark, who's an Austrianengineer who had the idea in the 1930s.Because for the previous 300 years, there'd been thisdesire for people to mechanize calculating, becausecalculating was quite effortful.It was quite difficult.Wouldn't it be great if machines could do it for us?And the first person to have this idea was Pascal in about1650, who invented the Pascaline.And then Leibniz invented his Step Reckoner, and et cetera,et cetera, et cetera.By the Victorian Age, there were these big deskcalculators, where that's where the phrase "numbercrunching" comes from.People would do these complicated multi...
