Remove the outer casing on the Monroe PC-1421, a 1964 mechanical calculator, and this is what you’ll find. Courtesy of Kevin Twomey Mark Glusker had heard rumors about the mechanical calculator, a ...

Mechanical calculators are an engineering marvel unknown to most people. The most advanced mechanical calculator ever built, the Curta calculator, fits into the palm of your hand and uses dozens of ...

Everyone learns in grade school that you can’t divide by zero, but few of us ever learn (or fully understand) why. The stock answer is that it gives you an answer of infinity. The truth is a bit more ...

Blaise Pascal is known for a number of things, but we remember him best for the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator. [Chris Staecker] got a chance to take a close look at one, which is quite a ...

Before the electronic calculator, there was the mechanical calculator, a heavy device often about the size of a small computer that cost thousands in today’s dollars. They were indispensable tools ...

HAMPTON, Va. — I visited the Hampton History Museum to learn more about a mechanical calculator used at NASA Langley. "We have an artifact that is really nondescript gray, about the size of a ...

This chaos of churning gears comes down to a fairly simple explanation. Division is just a series of sequential subtraction, and division by zero is the sequential subtraction of zero, over and over ...

Iofree has created a new retro mechanical calculator called the Digit which it has launched via Kickstarter this week and already blasted past its required pledge goal thanks to over 450 backers with ...

NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks to mathematician Eugenia Cheng about the Pascaline — a 17th-century invention credited as the first mechanical calculator. Blaise Pascal was a mathematician, a scientist, a ...

I first learned about the Curta from this January 2004 article in Scientific American, by Cliff Stoll. Unfortunately, the article is not available for free. But you can purchase a PDF of the whole Jan ...

If you’re into mechanical devices or Fourier series (or both!), you’ve got some serious YouTubing to do. In Synthesis, [The Engineer Guy] explains how the machine creates an arbitrary waveform from ...