From Abacus to Pocket Power: The Amazing Evolution of Calculators

-Karthik Gurumurthy

It’s wild to think about how far calculators have come! What started with people moving beads on an abacus over 2,500 years ago has transformed into tiny electronic marvels we can wear on our wrists.

The abacus was the OG calculator – first mentioned by Herodotus around 484-425 BCE and used throughout Europe and Asia for the next 2,000 years. The Chinese version with its clever system of rods, crossbars, and beads (where different positions represented ones, tens, hundreds) was so effective that many people in China and Japan still used abaci well into the 1970s. There’s even a calculator made today that’s set into an abacus frame!

Things got more sophisticated in the 1600s with inventions like Napier’s bones (1617) – wooden or ivory rods marked with digits that used logarithms to make multiplication easier. This was basically the forerunner of the slide rule, which remained popular until the mid-1900s.

The mechanical calculator journey is fascinating! In 1623, Wilhelm Schickard created a “calculator-clock” with cylinders showing logarithms through small windows. Then 19-year-old Blaise Pascal built the “pascaline” in 1642 to help his tax collector father, using eight joined rotary dials representing different place values.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz improved on these designs in 1673 with a calculator that could multiply and divide through repeated addition and subtraction. But it wasn’t until 1820 that calculators became commercially successful with Charles Thomas’s arithmometer.

The real game-changers came in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Herman Hollerith’s 1890 punched card tabulating machine led to the founding of the Tabulating Machine Company, which later became IBM! And it’s cool to see that women made significant contributions – inventors like Emily Duncan (who had eight kids!) and Edith Clarke patented calculators in the early 1900s. Robert Pelham, an African American Census Bureau employee, invented a tabulating machine in 1905 that saved enormous time counting the population.

The electronic revolution began in 1963, but the true breakthrough came with Jack Kilby’s work at Texas Instruments. By 1967, they had created the “Miniature Electronic Calculator” with a thermal printer display and rechargeable battery. When it hit stores in 1971 (renamed the “Pocketronic”), it cost $150 and weighed 2.5 pounds – expensive and heavy by today’s standards but revolutionary then!

The LCD display completely changed the game. The liquid crystal is sandwiched between electrodes, and when electricity flows through certain segments, they appear dark, forming digits from 0-9. Inside, everything works in binary (just 1s and 0s), and the integrated circuit (IC) – the calculator’s “brain” – solves equations instantly.

Today, we’ve got over 50 million portable calculators sold yearly in the US alone, many costing less than $10. Some are credit card-sized, others are wearable watches, and the most advanced ones are practically mini-computers that can be programmed to perform complex operations at the touch of a button.

It’s incredible to think this all started with people moving beads on rods thousands of years ago!