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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator. By Keith Houston. W.W. Norton & Company; 384 pages; $32.50. To be published in Britain in October; £25 WHEN WAS the last time you used a ...

Watch as a frustrating math problem inspires a creative journey from paper to precision engineering. See how a simple multiplication error sparks the design of a mechanical DIY calculator, beautifully ...

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., willl unveil a recreation of Charles Babbages 19th century mechanical digital calculator, the Difference Engine No. 2. Starting in May, many will ...

If you’re into mechanical devices or Fourier series (or both!), you’ve got some serious YouTubing to do. In Synthesis, [The Engineer Guy] explains how the machine creates an arbitrary waveform from ...

Iofree has created a new retro mechanical calculator called the Digit which it has launched via Kickstarter this week and already blasted past its required pledge goal thanks to over 450 backers with ...

I first learned about the Curta from this January 2004 article in Scientific American, by Cliff Stoll. Unfortunately, the article is not available for free. But you can purchase a PDF of the whole Jan ...

From early on in math class, you’re taught that you cannot divide a number by zero. On paper, it doesn’t work out. Do it electronically, and you’ll get an error ...