FACIT C1-13

Calculators like this FACIT C1-13 were a ubiquitous sight in accounting offices around the world in the 1950s and 1960s. My mother, for instance, remembers using one of these during her brief employment at an accounting firm in Budapest sometime in the late 1950s (her boss had an electric version! Of course it was the boss who used her calculator the least often...) I recall spending many an evening playing with one such calculator in the small administrative office of the resort hotel north of Budapest where my stepfather was a manager.

Although much larger, these calculators operate on the same principle as the legendary Curta, using a stepped-drum mechanism. Thanks to the movable carriage, these machines are well suited for multiplication and long division. Although the method is somewhat cumbersome, it is possible to compute square roots on the C1-13 with reasonable efficiency (I wouldn't want to be doing it all day long, mind you.) The picture to the right shows the result of one such calculation: I just finished computing the square root of π.

These mechanical marvels have all but disappeared in recent decades. The last mechanical FACIT calculator was reportedly made in India in 1982. I was fortunate to have been able to acquire a machine in surprisingly good condition, working flawlessly more than three decades after its manufacture.

As these labor-saving machines are replaced in offices around the world by newer labor saving devices such as accounting software packages and corporate networks, I cannot help but wonder. Cranking the handle can be a pain in the proverbial posterior, but is it really that much worse when compared with frustrating network outages, software bugs, and other mysterious computer problems? Ask your accountant next time what he or she thinks...