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7/26/10

Curta Portable Calculator - Ten clocks in one
fishing reel.

I found
this ad in the back of  a 1952 copy of Popular Mechanics. I may have looked
right past it if I hadn't read Pattern
Recognition, by William Gibson. The Curta is featured in the early parts of
the novel.

The Curta Portable
Calculator is a mind-injuringly complicated mechanical pocket calculator,
developed in the forties by Curt Herztark. The price in the ad is $134.50, which
in modern money is $1075.18. "Wow" is right. Curtas are currently selling
on Ebay starting around a thousand dollars, going up to several thousand for
rare examples. Somehow, a few sellers are clued in enough to understand the
value of a Curta despite not being able to spell "wonderfull". You'd think
they'd be listing the device as a fishing reel. Oh, sorry... "Fishing
real".

The Chicago address on the ad is almost certainly an importing
company. Herztark seems to have  lived out his postwar life in Austria, and
to have maintained control of the commercial rights to the Curta.

Cliffs
notes version of the Curta's invention, courtesy of the Summarization Department
of Phil Are Go! now follows. Herztark filed a patent in 1930's Vienna for a
mechanical pocket calculator, though he had not built one yet. In 1938, the
Nazis stuck him in the Buchenwald concentration camp on grounds of partial
Jewishness. Never missing an opportunity to be dicks, the Nazis decided that the
Curta calculator would make a nice gift for Hitler, so they told him to finish
the design in prison, and in exchange they'd declare him an Aryan after they won
the war... if the device were determined to be "really worth something".
Herztark did so, but the war did not go exactly as the Nazis had planned, and
riding on the virtue of his invention, Herztark  managed to build his
business and make money after the war.

So, this device was designed by
one man, in a prison camp, working with paper and pencil and maybe a few rulers.

The Curta worked by entering numbers via the
sliders on the sides of the device. Turning the crank on the end added the
digits, and the result was displayed in a little window, also on the end of the
unit. To subtract, the crank was pulled outwards, like a watch stem, and then
rotated. Other functions like multiplication could be carried out with further
manipulations of the crank and carriage adjustments, all of which engaged
different sets of wiggly bits inside, which in turn  motivated the gnomes
to run the functions.

The Curta was fantastically reliable despite it's
unreasonable mechanical complexity, and they only fell out of use in the 1970's
with the advent of electronic calculators. Few were returned to the company
under warranty, but many were returned after owners, being retards, disassembled
them. Many of the Curta's components are visually identical, but functionally
distinct, and curious owners often wound up spending half the Curta's value in
service charges to get them put back together properly.

It is a
historical irony that the owners of disassembled Curtas could have worked out
just how retarded they were, if only they hadn't disassembled their Curtas. But
in that case, then they wouldn't be retards. The only solution of this logical
impossibility would be to own two Curtas -  one to take apart and one to
calculate your idiocy afterwards. If both were eventually disassembled, the
owner would probably find a way to be killed walking down to the post office to
send the units back to the company. History has shown time and again that stupid
is always expensive.

Posted by [email-masked]
at 7:21
AM

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Labels:
ads, inventions

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2 comments:

Phil said...

My new maxim: Stupid is Expensive. XD

9/1/10
8:01 AM

Phil
Are Go! said...

I have been expensive many times in the past, and will be again... possibly
today. Cheap is hard!

9/1/10
8:05 AM

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