![]() Eventually, a senior German engineer took him aside. They hung people so they died slowly, a wretched death.” Herzstark was put to work in an adjacent factory that built components for Germany’s V2 rockets. “When they hung someone,” Herzstark recalled, “we had to watch until he finally died. He was sent to the Pankratz prison in Prague and later transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp in central Germany.Ĭonditions were horrific. “I was accused of supporting Jews, aggravation, and having an erotic relationship with an Aryan woman. ![]() Two colleagues were arrested for listening to British radio stations, and when Herzstark was offered to testify on their behalf, he, too, was arrested. Herzstark, the son of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, feared the worst, though for the next few years, the factory was allowed to continue to operate, so long as it produced machines and tools for the German army. On March 12, 1938, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany (during the event known as the Anschluss). Multiplication and division were slightly more complicated, but they still required just a few flicks of the sliders and a few turns of the crank.īy 1937, Herzstark had the essentials of the design worked out after that, it was just a matter of machining the parts and building a prototype.Īnd then Hitler came to power. A central hand crank would turn the drum, and shifting the drum’s position by a few millimeters was enough to switch between the adding and subtracting functions. At the heart of the device would be a single, rotating “step-drum” the drum would have two sets of teeth, one for addition and one for subtraction. He also reasoned that there only needed to be a single calculating mechanism, so long as each input digit could access it. ![]() Herzstark began to experiment with “sliders” that wrapped around a cylinder so that numbers could be entered by moving a thumb or finger. I started to design the ideal machine from the outside first, before I designed the insides.” “And if one can hold it in one hand, then if it is miniaturized, you could adjust it with the other hand. “What does this kind of machine really have to look like so that someone could use it? It cannot be a cube or a ruler it has to be a cylinder so that it can be held in one hand,” Herzstark mused. Simply taking existing designs and making all of the various parts smaller wouldn’t do the trick the keys and knobs would be too small to use. Slide rules were not good enough his customers wanted precise figures, not approximations. “People said again and again, ‘Yes, that is nice, but isn't there anything smaller?’” Herzstark recalled. He recalled that as sophisticated as his company’s machines were, “something was missing in the world market.” He remembered meeting with architects, foremen, and customs officers who needed calculating machines that were not only accurate and reliable but also portable. Thanks to an extensive interview conducted for the Charles Babbage Institute many years later, we have Herzstark’s own recollections of those busy years. He traveled extensively across Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, selling mechanical calculators to banks and factories. Born in 1902 in Vienna, Herzstark was running the family business by the 1930s. The shortcomings of these machines were very much on the mind of the young Curt Herzstark, whose family was in the business of making and selling calculating machines and other office equipment. By the late 19 th century, more reliable desktop calculators began to appear, but they were heavy and expensive. There were also various kinds of mechanical adding machines, but most were crudely built and unsuited to scientific work. The first slide rules appeared in the 17 th century, not long after John Napier’s invention of the logarithm, but they could only handle a couple of positions beyond the decimal place. For centuries, anything more than simple addition was painfully time-consuming. Our smartphones have calculator apps, and most of us have a pocket calculator somewhere in our home or office. Today, we take number-crunching for granted. The idea of the Curta came to its Austrian-born inventor in the darkness of the Buchenwald concentration camp. And its story is all the more compelling in light of the extraordinary circumstances in which it was invented. It first appeared in 1948, and for the next two decades-until it was displaced by the electronic calculator-it was the best portable calculating machine on the planet. The diminutive “Curta” is a striking machine, a mechanical calculator that combines the complexity of a steamship engine and the precision craftsmanship of a fine pocket watch. It resembles a pepper grinder-or perhaps a hand grenade. It’s no bigger than a drinking glass, and it fits easily in the palm of the hand.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |