The Obituary
For three centuries arithmetic was done by machinery of brass and steel. Blaise Pascal built his geared adding machine in 1642 at nineteen to ease his father’s tax accounts, and Leibniz extended it to multiplication. Successors filled offices: hand-cranked and motorized calculators that summed columns and worked out products through interlocking wheels, clattering as they carried digits. The pinnacle, the pocket-sized Curta, packed the mechanism into a hand-held cylinder turned like a pepper grinder. Then the electronic calculator arrived in the early 1970s — silent, faster, and soon cheaper — and the gears fell still almost overnight.
Worth remembering
- Blaise Pascal built his adding machine at nineteen to help his tax-collector father.
- The Curta, a handheld cylinder nicknamed the 'pepper grinder', was prized into the 1970s.
Sources
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.