Vintage Calculators

Q: Years ago I bought two old calculating machines from a friend. One is an Arithometer made by Tate’s of London. It is solid brass and weighs about 35 pounds. The other is a pinwheel calculating machine that appears to have been manufactured in Russia. The name on it is in Cyrillic letters. This machine weighs about 16 pounds.

A: Museums and computer companies like to display early calculating machines. The first machine called an Arithometer was a mechanical calculator that could add, subtract, multiply and divide. It was invented in 1820 by a Frenchman named Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar. The machine was commercially manufactured as early as 1852, but S. Tate of London didn’t start making his version until 1883. Tate continued to improve the machine into the early 1900s and many were sold in the United States. Your pinwheel calculating machine was patented in Russia in 1878 by a Swedish engineer named Willgodt T. Odhner. It was more sophisticated than Tate’s Arithometer, which was basically an adding machine. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Odhner’s machine was manufactured in Sweden. Dozens of manufacturers around the world made machines like it until the early 1970s.