Empire of the Sum

May 15, 2023
The success of the pocket calculator relied on operational simplicity, but it involved a complex process of false starts, slow advances, and ingenious thinking. Houston is a writer with a taste for the esoteric, as he showed in his book about punctuation, Shady Characters. In his latest, he charts the development of the pocket calculator, delivering a fascinating, witty tale. The human search for reliable ways of counting has been long and circuitous, ranging from notches on bones to the abacus to clunky mechanical machines. Houston has a good time hunting down some of the attempts of the 19th century; most of them did not work very well, but they laid the groundwork for later improvements. War and navigation were the key drivers in the search for arithmetic accuracy, and the author introduces us to a cast of colorful characters along the way. He takes a variety of fun detours, such as a discourse on the history of pockets and a discussion of the Curta, a hand-held calculating device of gears and wheels. Slide rules became essential tools for the numerically minded, and the development of crank-operated accounting machines was a huge step forward. But the real genesis of the pocket calculator came with the Casio line, which switched the focus from mechanics to electronics. The next major improvement was the addition of built-in formulae and logarithmic tools, which turned arithmetic into math. Houston unpacks the breakthrough products, including the Hewlett-Packard HP-35 and the Texas Instruments TI-81. He believes that the heyday of the pocket calculator was the 1980s and '90s. After that, cellphones and laptops became unbeatable competition. However, the fact that these digital advances integrated calculators into their operations meant that the idea lived on, albeit in another form. "The calculator is dead; long live the calculator," he concludes. An entertaining, informative story about a technology that defined an era.

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June 5, 2023
Historian Houston (Shady Characters) surveys the evolution of mathematical calculation, from prehistory to the 20th century, in this informative study. Beginning with a chapter on “The Hand,” Houston details humans’ first attempts to count beyond the number of digits they possessed. As humans evolved, so too did their counting tools, progressing from Chinese counting rods and the Greek counting board of the 700s to the 300s BCE; to the abacus, which definitively emerged in China around 200 BCE; and the slide rule, first utilized by British mathematicians in the 17th century, which “ruled the greater part of the modern era.” The first calculating computer, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, was created by Harvard in 1944. The race to make calculators smaller, faster, and more powerful was dominated by big names—Intel, HP—and would eventually lead to the device that ended the calculator’s dominance: the personal computer. With the advent of the first pocket-size calculator in 1971, followed shortly by the first scientific calculator, which could execute more complicated functions such as graphing and square roots, the age of the calculator had reached its pinnacle by 1974. This thorough study explains complex technical advancements with wit and charm. Math lovers and history buffs will be equally entertained.