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 ...

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 ...

Earlier this year, [Dan Maloney] went inside mechanical calculators. Being the practical sort, [Dan] jumped right into the Pascaline invented by Blaise Pascal. It couldn’t multiply or divide. He then ...

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 ...

From early on in math class, you’re taught that you cannot divide a number by zero. On paper, it doesn’t work out. Do it electronically, and you’ll get an error ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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