It looks like I missed that Monroe was acquired by Litton at some point but it's impressive none the less that they are still operating as a calculator company today!
My father had a job repairing electrified Munro calculators. He said the basic calculator was actually very reliable, but they had various add-ons to do different functions and these cause problems. Also being in the UK pounds shillings and pence options meant that the lower three numbers used a different base, which, as you can imagine also cause problems, especially apparently the happening column.
I like how this also kind of serves as a mechanical, physical demonstration of what “computer architecture” actually even means. The simplicity and usability definitely makes this win in my book. I also distinctly remember seeing those hand movements on the cranks in some older films.. hmmm. Fascinating stuff. Love watching the numbers spin.
My Dad used to sell Monroe calculators back in the 50's-70's. I saw all the calculators and how they changed. I remember how amazed we were when dad brought home the first handheld calculator. You know they used to be really nice machines and some of them were very advanced.
My grandfather serviced Monroe calculators in the same time period. Primarily Kansas City, Austin, Dallas, El Paso and New Jersey. He always told me stories about sitting in on meetings at the Los Alamos rocket testing range while working on their calculators. I lost him not long ago but found a Monroe calculator on ebay that I plan on restoring. He wrote a service manual on one of the later models and we are trying to find it before I dive in. Hopefully it didn't get thrown out.
12:20 from what I understand, you would remove the lever when you left your desk so that nobody could come along and mess up your calculation. Kind of like removing the reverser handle from a locomotive so nobody can come along and take it out of neutral, or a lock-out padlock to prevent someone from turning an electrical breaker on when you're working on electrical equipment. Basically a "don't touch this" indicator.
I used to service and repair these mechanical monstrosities. Mostly mechanical cash registers, but a few of these. Those things made working on cars look easy!
Hello from Monroe! This is an awesome video that showcases one of our original calculators😎 We are happy to say that we are still going strong today and we actually just released a new printing calculator earlier this year! If there is any other super cool videos you have about our calculators we would love to see them!😀
Why don't you send him a modern printing calculator of yours for him to compare to the older ones? It's nice to see that your company has stood the test of time.
Holy crap these bring back memories . I had one like the newest you just snagged ... if it wasnt that one it was very close . It was in with a pile of junk in a box that i found as a kid, like just out of diapers .. it was something i would play with and most likely destroyed even further than it was when i found it . Hind Sight eh :S
7:39 I can see why you might think that your Monroe is a pinwheel calculator. The user interface works very similarly to that of a pinwheel calculator. However, all the resources I’ve read about Monroe machines say that they used a stepped drum mechanism. Pinwheel calculators use gears that have an adjustable number of teeth, but a stepped drum machine works by moving a cylinder with a staggered set of grooves on the side. There’s a good animation of it on the Wikipedia article for “Leibniz wheel”.
Thanks for posting this. I actually have one that I used (along with a slide rule) before electronic calculators came out. You explained a lot of features that I never figured out on my own, so it's coming down from the attic for another work session.
Interesting stuff thanks. I really wanted to see what was happening with the division demo. Unfortunately with all the lights the digits were completely washed out. Sometimes I could get a glimpse, but mostly from my point of view on on a 55” 4K TV I would hear ‘and there you see the result’ and nothing had changed. No worries, the explanation was great and kept me watching to the end. Perhaps something to keep in mind when you do more.
I'd love to get a Facit calculator. They're pinwheel calculators with a distinctive keyboard layout enabled by an internal carriage for the input register.
At a small-town thrift shop some years back I picked up a similar Monroe calculator. It is electrically powered (though it has a empty socket for a crank) and you can really smell the ozone when it runs! It was re-badged as a Vanguard product for some reason. I discovered that it was a Monroe calculator by the name stamped on the electrical cable. Some research done in the last few minutes suggests it is similar to the Monroe LAS-160 though the number keys alternate between white and black in groups of three so it is not a definite identification.
Looking at the Burroughs one makes me wonder what on earth you do to enter a zero. It's amusing how neglected 0 was as a number up until maybe the last 100 years. I just watched a video about an obscure old apparatus for doing multiplication called number nines rods. Which are basically just multiplication tables. But the inventor didn't include any leading zeroes on the rods, or in the book about them with tables and things of that nature. Even though not using leading zeroes made the use of the rods much more difficult and convoluted than if he'd just included the leading zeroes. It's weird that throughout history, there have been many instances of perfectly legitimate, useful numbers were ignored and treated like they were made up or imaginary. The Pythogoreans believed whole numbers were pure, and so didn't "believe in" any fractions or use them in math. And as mentioned before, poor zero has been treated as a non-number pretty much from its discovery in Egypt in 1770 BCE until just around 100 years ago. Similarly, negative numbers were treated the same way. To the point where mathemeticians would go to great lengths in their math to avoid using any negative numbers. Even though it meant making the process a lot longer and more complicated and less effective (the more steps the more chance for error). Then there are the "imaginary" numbers, which were called that literally as a derogatory term to imply that they aren't real. And I guess the same can be said of complex numbers, since they're made partly of imaginary numbers. And. I just had a debate with somebody a few months ago who was trying to claim imaginary/complex numbers aren't real because you can do the same math using vectors or matrices. But I pointed out how useless and again, needlessly awkward and complicated that is at least in the context of analysis of electrical circuits. You NEED complex and imaginary numbers to do such analyses. But people still treat imaginary numbers as if they were literally imaginary. Which is why I prefer the term Gauss proposed instead, lateral number. Since the imaginary numbers literally lie laterally to the real numbers on the number line. That's just a few examples based on my small sampling of mathematics. But I'm sure there are many other examples. I can understand how a layperson might think something like an imaginary number might not be real. It's not an easy thing to understand at first and I remember learning the stuff in school always thinking that a lot of the stuff in math just seems like some jerk made it up and it has no real use. If they taught you engineering along side it, it gives you a practical application to apply all of these seemingly random and arbitrary concepts that just seem made up. It wasn't until I learned about electrical engineering that I really appreciated the real world implications of all of those things I learned where you think "well when am I ever gonna need THAT in real life?" But I would expect that a well educated mathemetician whose very life is dedicated to understanding this stuff would be able to see how something like a complex/imaginary number is applicable to the real world and can be used to make many mathematical tasks much easier. Or even possible.
Very cool! Turning the handle to add or subtract to/from the register looks very satisfying. You could write a "game" for the Playdate console to emulate it, although the crank would have to perform double duty as the add/subtract and register clear.
From what you show here, the Monroe appears to be a direct ancestor of the Curta. A lot of the functionality and calculations are quite similar, if I'm not mistaken.
Actually 3.142 is correct if rounded to 3 places. Another term for pinwheel calculators is the rotary calculator. I used to have a Vriden DW10 electric rotary calc when I was a kid. Being a budding tech geek, I had a ball with that thing.
Yesterday I was flipping through a Newsweek from 1941 and I came across a Comptometer ad. Which was really odd, cause I watched this video only a few hours before!
I'm wondering who would use these and what would be the average eye cue (sic) of someone who used it occupationally. I'm assuming it wouldn't be an accountant and that they would hire someone specifically to do this who would be underneath an actual CPA.
@@lo1bo2 That makes sense, but I was thinking more of big firms. These things have hundreds (if not thousands) of moving parts and probably took many days of man-hours to just assemble, let alone to make and sort all the parts. and all of the assembly lines involved. So I would think they were out of the budget for small firms. But maybe not. I really don't know. But Bookkeepers sounds as good as anything I can think of. Perhaps "traveling bookkeepers" who do the books for multiple small firms on a contract basis? For them, this would be not so much an expense, but a productivity money making investment. I used to have links to Bureau of Labor statistics going back decades of various jobs and the average eye cue of people doing those jobs. I'll have to try and find it again.
@tarstarkusz My grandfather serviced Monroe calculators. I recall him talking about going to grocery stores to do repairs as well as Los Alamos missle range for the scientists that worked there.
I just got a Monroe that looks very similar to yours in a thrift store for $8. I think it works, the main crank hits a stop going backwards like yours. The carriage hooks don’t release, I can pull them back and move the carriage but maybe something is locked? There’s a knob with arrow on the lower left which turns (you don’t have it), don’t know what that’s for.
Turned the knob you don’t have clockwise (marked MEM COUNT) so now the arrow points right to the keyboard. That unlocked the carriage. Running the upper crank backwards is sticking until I ran the carriage right several places but it feels a bit tight. Got it cleared. It has 8 place entry, 16 digits on the main register and 8 upper right. No upper left register.
This is a part of history I'm glad I missed. Imagine a supermarket outfitted with these machines, you'd have to wait hours before they were ready to total your shopping 😉
Ancestors of this were in use up until the 1990s. I remember some (electro)mechanical cash registers used as late as the early 2000s. They aren't slow at all.
I found two later comptometers in the dump just today, they don't work but I want to take them apart and see if it's possible for me to get them to a some-what working condition
11:50 you're actually supposed to continue down the columns, the 9's compliment of 0 is 9, so you type a 9 while holding the carryover in the 10's digit
If you tried to divide by zero, you would just end up cranking it backwards over and over again without any change to the dividend. That’s the ‘error’ you get when you try it on this kind of machine. Apparently sometimes Friden electromechanical calculators would get stuck in an endless loop if someone accidentally divided by zero 😂
idk what you did to your mic but your old voice was better because it sounded more direct. this sounds kind of muted, like you're talking to us through a thin door.
mechanicals not my cup of tee. still hats off to the engineers who developed these complex (and compact) 'sheens. nothing you put together in 12 months from scratch.
I watched this and wondered where the value of something like this would be when it would be faster and easier to do all of these functions longhand... then I remembered that these devices predate New Math.
"like how everybody imitates Apple these days" "these days" being the last 38 years... but I guess that's an appropriate definition for the purpose of this channel.
why do computer people do this? i mean, mechanical keyboard is understandable (looks cooler), but mechanical calculator? isnt it a little too much, compared to good old battery based calculator? adds unnecessary mechanical complexity...
