Remove the outer casing on the Monroe PC-1421, a 1964 mechanical calculator, and this is what you’ll find. Courtesy of Kevin Twomey Mark Glusker had heard rumors about the mechanical calculator, a ...

Dividing by zero is complicated and we all know it's something you can't and shouldn't do. The simple—but still not perfect—explanation is that if you divide something by zero, the answer approaches ...

Everyone learns in grade school that you can’t divide by zero, but few of us ever learn (or fully understand) why. The stock answer is that it gives you an answer of infinity. The truth is a bit more ...

It's not just us that can freak out when we can't solve a complex maths problem. The answer to 'what is one divided by zero?' causes old-fashioned calculators to have a mechanical meltdown. A video ...

Earlier this year, [Dan Maloney] went inside mechanical calculators. Being the practical sort, [Dan] jumped right into the Pascaline invented by Blaise Pascal. It couldn’t multiply or divide. He then ...

Blaise Pascal is known for a number of things, but we remember him best for the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator. [Chris Staecker] got a chance to take a close look at one, which is quite a ...

Before the electronic calculator, there was the mechanical calculator, a heavy device often about the size of a small computer that cost thousands in today’s dollars. They were indispensable tools ...

I was just in an email ‘conversation’ with someone when I mentioned my Curta mechanical calculator, and he responded “Pictures Please!” so here we are… Just in case you haven’t heard about this before ...

The "Odhner Arithmometer" is a pinwheel style mechanical adding machine that was invented in Russia by Swedish immigrant W. T. Odhner in the 1870s and produced until 1917 when, during the revolution, ...