Victorian mechanical calculators worked fine, but weren't exactly pocket sized

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Victorian mechanical calculators worked fine, but weren’t exactly pocket sized

The calculator has been around well before the electronics age, though before electronics, there had to be a whole lot of moving parts to get mechanical calculators to calculate correctly. That meant they were big mamma-jammas, but they were certainly works of art.

Here’s the story behind the above calculating machine:

After about three months of designing, in June, 1782, the project was ready and Müller gave the drawings to a clockmaker in Darmstadt, with the order to make the machine in metal. The work was taken over by a pair of journeymen in the same trade and on the 20th of June 1784, the machine was ready. On 24th of June, 1784, the 14-digit calculator (see the upper image) was demonstrated in the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, which appointed him as a correspondent.

Müller’s calculating machine is very similar to the machine of Hahn and was based on the Stepped Drum of Leibniz, but it is larger (285 mm diameter, 95 mm height, weight 15.4 kg). It was in the form of a round box with a handle placed centrally and the number wheels concentrically arranged around the handle. It could calculate with 14 figures and its number and gear wheels could be altered to enable it to operate with non-decimal number systems.

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