Curta Mechanical Calculator

[Dan]

Is anybody else oddly fascinated by this sort of precise mechanical shit? The Curta is a mechanical calculator that fits in the palm of your hand. I spent most of this morning reading about it. It is perfect in every way. It even has a great story about the inventor being forced to design it for Hitler in the German concentration camps.

I think that if I get better at machining, I would like to build a device similar to this some day. I won't post a link because I am sure you all know how to use Google if you are interested.

 

[Lokizen]

It will work nicely when a major EMP blast takes out the internet!

Yeah, I love mechanical stuff like this, my dad used to have an old Russian flashlight that used a hand cranked flywheel for power.

 

[Terminator]

Interesting and damn that's a lot of machining!

It certainly would make an interesting project to build something like that.

I have always thought about (but never seriously) building mechanical computers using various techniques, alternatives to what history provided.

I was thinking about water based calculators, using volumes of water and various wheels and scales to create a basic computing device....the energy would be provided by gravity and it'd be the most hideously slow and inefficient way of computing but it'd be and interesting experiement.

Another interesting thing to try would be using high precision engineering to produce a very small scale mechanical computer, a la swiss watch, using nano technology could you produce an effective mechanical calculator that would be the equivalent size of a pocket calculator?

 

[Direwolf]

All hail Charles Babbage!

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)