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Arithmometer

Arithmomètre built by Louis Payen around 1887

The arithmometer (French: arithmomètre) was the first digital mechanical calculator strong enough and reliable enough to be used daily in an office environment. This calculator could add and subtract two numbers directly and could perform long multiplications and divisions effectively by using a movable accumulator for the result.

Patented in France by Thomas de Colmar in 1820[1] and manufactured from 1851[2] to 1915,[3] it became the first commercially successful mechanical calculator.[4] Its sturdy design gave it a strong reputation for reliability and accuracy[5] and made it a key player in the move from human computers to calculating machines that took place during the second half of the 19th century.[6]

Its production debut of 1851[2] launched the mechanical calculator industry[4] which ultimately built millions of machines well into the 1970s. For forty years, from 1851 to 1890,[7] the arithmometer was the only type of mechanical calculator in commercial production, and it was sold all over the world. During the later part of that period two companies started manufacturing clones of the arithmometer: Burkhardt, from Germany, which started in 1878, and Layton of the UK, which started in 1883. Eventually about twenty European companies built clones of the arithmometer until the beginning of World War I.

  1. ^ "Brevets & Descriptions" [Patents & Descriptions]. www.arithmometre.org (in French). English translation available. Retrieved 2017-08-15.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  2. ^ a b Johnston, Stephen. "Making the arithmometer count". www.mhs.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2017-08-16.
  3. ^ Ageron, Pierre (July 2016). "L'arithmomètre de Thomas : sa réception dans les pays méditerranéens (1850-1915), son intérêt dans nos salles de classe". In Radford, L.; Furinghetti, F.; Hausberger, T. (eds.). Proceedings of the 2016 ICME Satellite Meeting of the International Study Group on the Relations Between the History and Pedagogy of Mathematics. Montpellier, France: IREM de Montpellier. pp. 655–670.
  4. ^ a b Chase G.C.: History of Mechanical Computing Machinery, Vol. 2, Number 3, July 1980, page 204, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing https://archive.org/details/ChaseMechanicalComputingMachinery
  5. ^ Ifrah G., The Universal History of Numbers, vol 3, page 127, The Harvill Press, 2000
  6. ^ Grier D.A.: When Computers Were Human, page 93, Princeton University Press, 2005
  7. ^ The Comptometer became the first competing design in production from 1887 but only one hundred machines were sold by 1890.

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