Beautiful, detailed photos of mechanical calculators' guts

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Even more amazing is that most of the parts are cheaply made by punching from sheetmetal. Making a mechanical calculator is an art, but making an affordable one is double so.

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when i was 10 my father bought me an old typewriter that no longer worked and gave me access to his tools and let me disassemble it. it took me three days and he occasionally stopped me to ask me about and tell me about why different parts were made the way they were. these photos remind me of that experience.

And here I thought that HR Giger was being original.

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I don’t know why but that style of image gallery never really works for me. Don’t know if its a Wired thing, or some plugin they use, but I get more black screens than photos.

Have a look at Jeremy Mayer’s disassembled typewriter sculptures:

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Iron Man’s boot

When I have the cash, I will buy a Curta.

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That name popped into my head immediately, too!

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How do you design a monster like that without the help of a computer?

I think it was impossible to achieve something like this with the technology available at the time.
There is only one valid conclusion: those 20th-century-people had help. From aliens.

It’s obvious when you look at the facts: mechanical calculating technology made significant leaps forward right after the 1908 Tunguska event and after the 1948 Roswell UFO crash.

It all fits together, you ony have to look at the EVIDENCE!!!

P.S.: How do I use colored backgrounds and blinking text on this BBS?

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@codinghorror: can haz comic sans blinktag for Discourse? :smiley:

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If you want to watch one being taken apart, http://youtu.be/rRYE1x-4kY8

Warning: it’s boring unless you’re into that sort of thing.

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very nice. i’m an aficionado of both the disassembly of intricate mechanical objects and boredom so this really is my kind of thing. thanks!

Holly mother of glod. If those were computer programs, they would be spaghetti code written in assembly. It would be glorious and highly unmaintainable. Entire teams of engineers devoted their entire lifetimes to work out how to make those machines and perfect them.

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“Fuck Digital. The future belongs to the analogue loyalists” - Big Black

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