Curta

One of my co-workers has a Curta calculator, which he brought in to work yesterday for show and tell. I covet. It’s a mechanical calculator, state of the art in its day, but now thoroughly obsolete. I first heard about them in Pattern Recognition. It looks like a small pepper mill, about 2” in diameter and 5” tall. It’s very tactile, and makes faint whirring and clicking noises as you operate it. It’s a lovely little piece of precision machinery, like an interactive watch.

They don’t make them anymore; haven’t since the early 70’s. You can find them on eBay, mostly between $900 and $1500, depending on condition. That’s way out of my range, though they’re so beautiful that I’d probably snap one up if they were under $100. Hear that, Engines of Capitalism?

One of my coworkers had (before he found out how much they cost) thought about getting one for his kids, to help teach them math. If someone were to start making these things again, that would be a great market. An electronic calculator is completely opaque—you just punch in the numbers and it gives you the answer. The Curta isn’t that simple; you have to understand how it does calculations. Really, it can only add numbers, so if you want to multiply 74 by 23, you actually start with 0, add 74 three times, then shift a decimal place and add 740 two times. If you want to multiply 74 by 29, you’d shift, add 740 three times, then shift back and subtract 74 once. It gives you a very intuitive sense of math. Also, lots of whirring and clicking.