The once ubiquitous mechanical calculator were engineering marvels… and as Kevin Twomey‘s photos also demonstrate, things of beauty…
More stunning photos of calculators (and typewriters and more) on Twomey’s site.
* Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673
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As we sum it up, we might send snappy birthday greetings to Nicéphore Niépce; he was born on this date in 1765. An inventor, he was a pioneer of photography…
The very first photograph was taken in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who aimed a camera obscura, which held a polished pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum), out the window of the upper-story workroom at his Saint-Loup-de-Varennes country house, Le Gras. After a day-long exposure, the plate was removed and the latent image of the view from the window was rendered visible by washing it with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum, which dissolved away the parts of the bitumen which had not been hardened by light. The result was this permanent direct positive picture– a one-of-a-kind photograph on pewter:
(For more on Niépce and the story of his pioneering accomplishment [and a larger version of this inagural image], visit the source of this photo, the site of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.)
For millennia, simple forms of record-keeping have been used as ways to keep track of debt, to substitute for the contemporaneous conveyance of specie, or to accommodate the future settlement and netting of debts. In England, tally sticks were regularly used. From Paolo Zannoni, an excerpt from his book, Money and Promises, via Richard Vague and his invaluable Delancey Place…
A tally is usually a stick, or a bone, or a piece of ivory — some kind of artefact — that is used to record information. Palaeolithic tallies include the Lembombo bone, found in the Lembombo Mountains in southern Africa, reported to date from around 44,000 BC; the Ishango bone, which consists of the fibula of a baboon, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the former Belgian Congo), thought to be 20,000 years old; and the so-called Wolf bone, discovered in Czechoslovakia during excavations at Vestonice, Moravia, in the 1930s, and estimated to be around 30,000 years old. Marked with notches and symbols, these tallies are ancient recording devices, means of data storage and communication. Not merely artefacts, they are important historical documents.
In England, from around the twelfth century, and for over 600 years, tallies became important financial instruments, a key part of public finance and an answer to a perennial problem for money-lenders, merchants and those involved in commerce and trade: how to both facilitate and record the exchange of goods, services and commodities. Reading these English tallies, understanding their history and their changing use, provides us with an understanding not only of the nature of individual financial transactions during the late medieval and early modern period, but also of the development of banking practices in England and its relationship to the English state.
Usually made of willow or hazelwood, tallies were used to record the key information of a financial exchange. The name of the parties involved, the specific trade and the date were written on each side of a stick. Notches of different sizes — which stood for pounds, shillings, and pence — were also cut on both sides. Then the stick was split in two along its length, creating a unique jagged edge; only those two pieces could ever fit perfectly together again. When someone presented one side as proof of a transaction, the parties could check for the right fit.
The potential uses for such a simple tool are obvious.
To begin with: an example of the early use of tallies as a record of debt repayment. John D’Abernon was the Sheriff of Surrey. His portrait in brass, in Stoke D’Abernon Church, Cobham, shows him as a knight in full armour, wielding a broadsword.
When he died, D’Abernon left his title, possessions and debts to his son, also named John. In 1293, we know that John D’Abernon gave two pounds and ten shillings to the Exchequer to pay a fine on behalf of his father. How do we know? Because at the time of payment, the official tally cutter made a series of notches on a stick: two cuts for the two pounds and one smaller notch for the ten shillings. The stick was then split, with the longer end going to John, and the shorter end staying with the Exchequer. The following words were inscribed on both sides: ‘From John D’Abernon for his father’s fine’ and ‘XXI year of the King Edward’.
John could thus prove to anyone that he had paid the fine of his father — simple and convenient.
Tallies also enabled the functioning of the tax system in medieval England, which was a rather more complex affair. The process took months to complete. It worked roughly like this. Tax receivers collected revenues from the King’s subjects at Easter. They then passed them on to the Exchequer, which completed an audit in late September or early October. At the time, the Exchequer had two branches: the Lower and the Higher. The Lower Exchequer received and disbursed the revenues. The Higher Exchequer audited the process. They used tallies to track who had paid whom. As soon as the Lower Exchequer received the revenues, the tally cutter recorded the payment on the tally and split the stick. The tax receiver — the debtor — got the longer part, called the ‘stock’. The Exchequer — the creditor — kept the short end of the stick, called the ‘foil’. And once a year, at Michaelmas, the Higher Exchequer audited the whole process by matching stocks and foils. The stock was the proof that the collector had not merely pocketed the tax revenues.
Over time, both the use and appearance of the tallies began to change: in the early years, tallies were 3 to 5 inches long; later, they grew to be 1 to 2 feet long, and sometimes much longer. More money meant more notches; more notches, in turn, required longer sticks. One of the last issues of tallies made by the English Exchequer was in 1729, for £50,000: the tally is a whopping 8 feet, 5 inches long, visible proof of the growth of public spending, taxation and inflation.
As the appearance of the tallies changed, so too did their uses. Inside the Exchequer, they served as receipts for money paid by taxpayers. Outside the Exchequer, they began to be put to entirely different purposes.
The business of the Exchequer simply could not work without the tally sticks. They were essential for auditing and controlling public finances, which obviously made them excellent collateral for a loan.
The tally was not a mere generic promise to pay, but a strong, unique claim on the proceeds of the Exchequer’s revenue stream. It identified the cashflow and the individual in charge of paying; the creditor gave the stock to the indicated tax receiver to get coins from a specific revenue stream, and a lender was sure to get his coins sooner or later. The humble English tally stick was therefore ripe to become a veritable public debt security, not merely a receipt. They functioned just like paper public debt securities, except instead of being written on paper, the transactions were instantiated and inscribed on sticks.
To take an early example: Richard de la Pole was a merchant who traded wool, wine and corn with France and central Europe in the early 1300s. He had a reputation for using debts aggressively to grow his business, which appealed to King Edward III and his advisors, who thought they might be able to make use of his skills. So, they appointed him Royal Butler. The job of butler was to supply all sorts of goods — food, wine and arms — to the royal household and to the army. We know that in 1328 Richard bought some wine from the French. As a good businessman, as Royal Butler, did he pay for the wine in coins? He did not. Rather, in order to pay the bill, the Lower Exchequer cut eight tallies, which were addressed to the collectors of taxes for West Riding in Yorkshire, listing the tax revenues earmarked to settle the debt. The Lower Exchequer gave the foils — one half of all the eight tallies — to Richard, who handed them to the merchants who sold him the wine. The merchants then exchanged the tallies with coins from the taxes paid in West Riding, and finally, a few months later, the Higher Exchequer called upon the tax receivers to account for the shortfall of cash, whereupon they presented the eight foils, which had been first given to Richard, as proof of the payments made.
To be clear: unlike coins, tallies did not actually settle debt. By accepting a foil, a vendor was effectively agreeing to a delayed payment from the Exchequer; the tally was a kind of guarantee that they would get coins. For the state, meanwhile, the tally was a convenient way to borrow from its suppliers, or a form of what we would now call vendor financing — the citizens and merchants who sold goods and services for tallies were effectively financing the state, in much the same way as those who lent actual coins to the Exchequer…
As money grows in importance, a new struggle is beginning for the control of it in the coming century. We are likely to see a prolonged era of competition during which many kinds of money will appear, proliferate, and disappear in rapidly crashing waves. In the quest to control the new money, many contenders are struggling to become the primary money institution of the new era…
* Adam Smith
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As we contemplate currency, we might recall that it was on this date in 1888 that William Seward Burroughs of St. Louis, Missouri, received patents on four adding machine applications (No. 388,116-388,119), the first U.S. patents for a “Calculating-Machine” that the inventor would continue to improve and successfully market– largely to businesses and financial institutions. The American Arithmometer Corporation of St. Louis, later renamed The Burroughs Corporation, became– with IBM, Sperry, NCR, Honeywell, and others– a major force in the development of computers. Burroughs also gifted the world his grandson, Beat icon William S. Burroughs.
From ancient Egyptian cubits to fitness tracker apps, humankind has long been seeking ever more ways to measure the world – and ourselves…
The discipline of measurement developed for millennia… Around 6,000 years ago, the first standardised units were deployed in river valley civilisations such as ancient Egypt, where the cubit was defined by the length of the human arm, from elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and used to measure out the dimensions of the pyramids. In the Middle Ages, the task of regulating measurement to facilitate trade was both privilege and burden for rulers: a means of exercising power over their subjects, but a trigger for unrest if neglected. As the centuries passed, units multiplied, and in 18th-century France there were said to be some 250,000 variant units in use, leading to the revolutionary demand: “One king, one law, one weight and one measure.”
It was this abundance of measures that led to the creation of the metric system by French savants. A unit like the metre – defined originally as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole – was intended not only to simplify metrology, but also to embody political ideals. Its value and authority were derived not from royal bodies, but scientific calculation, and were thus, supposedly, equal and accessible to all. Then as today, units of measurement are designed to create uniformity across time, space and culture; to enable control at a distance and ensure trust between strangers. What has changed since the time of the pyramids is that now they often span the whole globe.
Despite their abundance, international standards like those mandated by NIST and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) are mostly invisible in our lives. Where measurement does intrude is via bureaucracies of various stripes, particularly in education and the workplace. It’s in school that we are first exposed to the harsh lessons of quantification – where we are sorted by grade and rank and number, and told that these are the measures by which our future success will be gauged…
And for a look at what it takes to perfect one of the most fundamental of those measures, see Jeremy Bernstein‘s “The Kilogram.”
* “I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth. Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.” – Epitaph Johannes Kepler composed for himself a few months before he died
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As we get out the gauge, we might send thoughtfully-wagered birthday greetings Blaise Pascal; he was born on this date in 1623. A French mathematician, physicist, theologian, and inventor (e.g.,the first digital calculator, the barometer, the hydraulic press, and the syringe), his commitment to empiricism (“experiments are the true teachers which one must follow in physics”) pitted him against his contemporary René “cogito, ergo sum” Descartes– and was foundational in the acceleration of the scientific/rationalist commitment to measurement…
Mark Frauenfelder talks with Tanner Petch, the creator of play-able pieces of art: an arcade full of handmade pinball machines…
Sinkhole is a backwards game that borrows from the aesthetic of early pinball, particularly “wood rail” games from pre-1960s. The fact that it tilts away from you changes your experience a lot more than you’d expect and came from trying to question what were some of the very core aspects of pinball that could be tinkered with. In addition to the wooden components, the art style, playfield design, and overall theme were inspired by the esoteric nature of early games (at least compared to what we expect today)…
Prometheus was the first game I made and is based on the part of the myth where an eagle eats Prometheus’ liver every day after it regenerates. In the game, the player is the eagle, and the only objective is to hit four drop targets which represent four bites of the liver. You do this as many times as you want to, or until you lose. Rather than an individual score, the display shows the cumulative number of livers eaten as long as the machine has existed…
As we finesse the flippers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that Hewlett-Packard introduced the first handheld scientific calculator, the HP-35, a calculator with trigonometric and exponential functions. The model name was a reflection of the fact that the unit had 35 keys.
It became known as “the electronic slide rule”– a device that it (and its successors, from both HP and TI) effectively replaced.
Before electronic calculators became affordable in the 1970s, logarithm tables and slide rules were the most common calculation tools used by scientists, engineers, financiers, and navigators. But in the early 1940s there emerged a purely mechanical, pocket-sized calculator, the Curta; the “pepper mill,” as it was known, was short-lived – only 30 years or so – but it remains a mechanical marvel.
As we add it up, we might send intricately-interconnected birthday greetings to Mark D. Weiser; he was born on this date in 1952. After earning an MA and a PhD in computing at the University of Michigan, Mark worked for a variety of computer-related startups. But in 1987 he joined Xerox PARC, and began the work for which he is best remembered: he widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988 to describe the field he pioneered.
Mark was also the drummer of Severe Tire Damage, a garage (pun intended) rock band, the first band to perform on the internet: on June 24, 1993, the band was playing a gig at PARC while elsewhere in the building, scientists were discussing new technology (the MBone) for broadcasting on the Internet using multicasting. As proof of their technology, the band was broadcast and could be seen live in Australia (by a scientist there alerted by the Palo Alto crew) and elsewhere.
Then. on Friday, November 18, 1994, the Rolling Stones decided to broadcast one of their concert tours on the Internet. Before their broadcast, Severe Tire Damage returned to the Internet, this time becoming the “opening act” for the Stones– so instead of an obscure Australian researcher, the entire world press was watching, and Severe Tire Damage was elevated from obscurity to Warholian fame. Newsweek described STD as “a lesser known rock band.” The Rolling Stones told The New York Times: “the surprise opening act by Severe Tire Damage was a good reminder of the democratic nature of the Internet.”
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