Out of curiosity, why aren’t slide rules included in these kind of “mechanical calculator” roundups? They’ve been around since the 17th century. Is it their simplicity? Lack of gears?
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Nope. Starting in 1985, a mutlinational team built a working version of this machine, now housed at London’s Science Museum. This project demonstrated the difference engine could have been built with 19th century technology.
“The difference engine and printer were constructed to tolerances achievable with 19th-century technology, resolving a long-standing debate as to whether Babbage’s design could have worked using Georgian-era engineering methods.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine#Construction_of_two_working_No._2_difference_engines
I can’t find a written source, but recall an episode of “The Science Show” on (Australian) ABC radio that did an extended story about Boole and his difference engine. The opinions of the science historians interviewed seemed to be that Boole failed to complete construction due to his poor management skills and personality issues. His skills were in maths and engineering, not people-management and budgetting.
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3D illustration of a Mechanical Calculating Device, designed and created by the famous French Mathematician and Inventor Blaise Pascal in the mid XVII Century
I’m nothing short of admiration for Blaise Pascal who managed to create a 3D illustration on his computing device centuries ago!
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What with the ‘precision’ point I made earlier, the layout and format of the post being like three others this week whose content was ‘interesting’, and your observation about sentence construction, I wonder whether this post perhaps had some help from the LLM end of the authorship spectrum.
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My mom found a 1920s era Comptometer while tasked with cleaning out the attic above the company’s offices in the early 1970s. (She worked at an iron foundry that had been in operation since the early 1900s.) The office employees held a drawing for it that she won, so she brought it home, and we grew up playing with it.
Having established somewhat of a reputation by age 8, I was expressly forbidden from disassembling it to see how it worked. (The decades-old baked-on paint also thwarted my attempts to remove the screws holding it together.)
I do remember that the little bits I could examine, such as the print mechanism, were marvelous pieces of ingenuity.
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and how about the abacus?
When I was a kid I had a handheld counter for prices in the grocery store. Loved that thing.
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It doesn’t have to be gears, but mechanics implies forces and movement. Those are more of a clever look-up table divided into pieces for you to line up.
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thank goodness it comes with instructions…
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What, so deep in this topic and noone made a Big-endian quip?
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Gulliver’s Travels? I don’t see the connection.
Hubertus Bigend in Pattern Recognition? Curta collectors do figure in the plot.
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An abacus wouldn’t be a mechanical calculator. With an abacus a human operator is keeping track of the meaning of the bead positions. An abacus cannot mechanically perform any operations.
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If you want to see all these mechanical marvels in real life, I can recommend the Arithmeum, the University of Bonn museum for mathematics. It also has a remarkable collection of early computers and PCs, which are not part of the permanent exhibition but can be viewed (and seen in action!) during a guided tour through the museum’s depot (18:00 first Friday in the month, you need to book ahead).
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That one, because of that. I thought the Bigend trilogy would quickly pop up here, after only curt a while.
ETA: FTR, @GagHalfrunt: Gibson’s play with Hubertus’ big-endianess is exactly why I assumed that lanother convoluted but finite thread of puns would ensue here. Seems I miscalculated. I might be out of sync with the mechanics of the BBS.
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Arguably, the additor is just a slow abacus. It doesn’t have a 5 bead for each column, but other than that. the principles of use are the same.
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So same for slide rule?
Also, seems a @simonize pointed out, some of the others on the list might also not be mechanical calculating devices by this measure?
Was this the line drawn in the article? The level of human interaction? Because I’m pretty sure many generations of Chinese people would say they used an abacus as we use digital calculators. Now I’m going to go and buy one to remember how they work 
I checked the article. Here’s what it is looking for:
Mechanical calculators demonstrate the incredible progression of technological innovation and highlight the human drive to solve problems and improve efficiency in mathematical computations.
I also went and checked wikipedia and it seems abucuses are doing some calculating. @nukeml I think you erred in your assertion.
Any particular abacus design supports multiple methods to perform calculations, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square and cube roots.
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Nobody is saying you can’t calculate with an abacus. But you being able to perform calculations is not the same as it calculating – you can do all those things with Hindu-Arabic numerals and yet they are purely inert symbols. And as I said, mechanics implies a system with forces and movement. “Mechanical calculating device” only has three words, you can’t ignore the first.
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The wikipedia article says an abacus supports methods to do calculations, but it does not DO any of the functions. All operations are performed by the user, including basic functions such as carrying a one during addition. You may as well make a claim that a notepad and pencil are performing a calculation.
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