Building the Empire of the Sum with Keith Houston

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Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee,

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a global leader in science, technology, and innovation.

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My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum

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of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center.

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Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors,

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scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between,

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sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics.

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Welcome to AMSEcast.

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We very much appreciate your joining us for

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what is sure to be a fascinating episode.

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Our guest is author Keith Houston, whose work has been featured in

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publications like The New York Times, BBC Culture and the Wall Street Journal.

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He’s the creator of the Shady Characters blog, and his books include

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Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other

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Typographical Marks, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the

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Most Powerful Object of Our Time, and the work we will discuss today,

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Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator.

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Keith, thanks so much for joining us on AMSEcast.

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Not at all.

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Thank you for having me.

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I will tell you, my next work of yours I must

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read is The Book because I’m obsessed with books.

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The staff here will tell you, my poor wife

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will tell you, I’m a bit overwhelmed with them.

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And we started a nice book collection here at AMSE, I think, a good

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reference book collection that they very nicely called the Lowe Library.

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I did not ask for that [laugh] . So again, thanks so much for joining us.

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I loved Empire of the Sum.

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This really—I remember being in school and getting my first

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pocket calculator, and what a world of difference that made to me.

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But you go back—in the very beginning of this book—all

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the way back to, you know, when humans started counting.

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So, when do we have any evidence of that first happening?

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And why is it believed that even back in the midst of time,

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we learned how to count using our fingers and other digits?

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Both very good questions.

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The oldest known mathematical artifact is the femur of a baboon.

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So, a leg bone from a baboon.

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It’s about 42,000 years old, and it has a

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series of notches, kind of incised across it.

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And there are 29 of them, and it looks like they

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were inscribed or incised in four separate batches.

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And so, this is probably not decoration.

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This was intentional.

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This was being used to count something which

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numbered—or some group of things—which number 29.

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And that was found in a cave in South Africa, called the Lebombo

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bone and as I say, that is our oldest mathematical artifact.

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What I found quite interesting was that this, we would call it a tally stick.

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So, there’s a concept of using pieces of

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wood, other rods, bones, and so on, to count.

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And these were used all the way down to about the 19th century.

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There was an interesting—perhaps interesting, I imagine it’s

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slightly more scary than interesting at the time—but the Houses

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of Parliament in Britain, so where the elected members of the

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British government sit almost burned to the ground in I think

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it’s about 1834.

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So, up until that point, the Treasury—the government

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department that managed money and debt and so on—still

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used tally sticks to track debts that it was owed.

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And they were phased out in 1826, and then some janitors in

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Houses of Parliament were tasked with getting rid of them.

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So, they stoked up the boilers underneath the Houses of Parliament,

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they started burning tally sticks, and it all caught fire.

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Almost turned the whole place to the ground.

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Oh, my gosh.

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Did any tally sticks survive?

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Are there other tally sticks in the British Museum or other

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places that—they would be interesting to see—from that?

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Oh absolutely, yeah.

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It was quite a big event.

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You know, there are etchings, commemorative etchings, were

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made of the time it almost burned down because of tally sticks.

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Oh, my gosh [laugh]

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.
But yeah, they’re fascinating things.

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It’s really, I guess, at that point, they were slightly more specialized.

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The Lebombo bone was just a bone, just for counting some particular quantity.

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The tally sticks that were used, that were stored in the basement of

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the Houses of Parliament were sticks, wooden sticks that were split.

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And so, you could etch a number of notches across them, and then you could

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snap off one of those pieces, and now the person, both the debtor and the

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debtee have—or the creditor and the creditee—have got a copy of what is owed.

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And you can then trade these debts as if they’re money.

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They’re effectively paper money, in some sense.

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Almost like carbon copy.

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It sounds like that’s interesting.

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Mmm.

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Yeah, yeah.

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So, you move from that and a bit further in time, you talk

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about something I think a lot of us have seen at least in grade

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school, the abacus, and then and something related called a

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counting board, which I had not heard of before reading your book.

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So, can you tell us a bit about why those inventions were so

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fundamentally important in advancing our ability to calculate numbers?

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Another good question.

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Well, you mentioned last time, how do we know that we started to count?

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Where is the evidence for how we learn to count?

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And you mentioned we use our fingers and other anatomical—actually,

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there’s one particular group of people in Papua New Guinea who

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could count up to 33 using things like nipples and genitals as well.

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So, once they ran out of fingers, they just kept on going.

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So—

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I think we all do that, Keith.

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I think

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we all do [laugh]

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—
[laugh] . Indeed, indeed.

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Well, I’m sure we all have personal accounting systems.

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[laugh] . Right.

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So, I think the point is, if you’re using your hands, then you can only

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do—or other parts of your body—you’re limited to a single number at a time.

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Your body that is useful for other things, for things other

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than counting, is now tied up in recording those numbers.

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And so, an abacus—or a counting board, which is effectively an abacus,

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just on a flat surface, perhaps with some columns in it, and used

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pebbles or some other tokens to record, these are the ones, these are

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the tens, these are the hundreds, these are the thousands, and so on, so

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it just functions like an abacus—this gets the number out of your head.

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So, it has the same, I think, it has the same utility that writing has.

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Writing gets things out of your head and allows you to

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record things either temporarily or more permanently.

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And of course, calculation, as you’re working through

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some large calculation, it’s useful to have that temporary

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storage mechanism, as any computer scientist will tell you.

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That’s what registers are in a computer, just

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there to hold things that you don’t need right now.

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Yeah, makes sense.

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And you continue that kind of evolution.

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You talk about John Napier, again, someone I

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didn’t know anything about until I read your book.

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Can you tell us about Mr.

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Napier and his creation, the logarithm, why that was so fundamentally important?

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I loved learning about John Napier.

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I guess I knew of him.

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He was born in the 16th century.

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He was a Scottish—well, he was a landowner,

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sort of a member of the landed gentry.

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He was an astronomer and an alchemist, as most scientists were at that point.

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It wasn’t really a distinction between being an

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alchemist, and being just your common or garden scientist.

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He needed, as did many scientists, astronomers, astrologers, in

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fact—because again, there is little distinction between the two at that

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point—he needed a way to do fairly complicated mathematical problems

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that involved things like trigonometry, and also multiplication.

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And so, he discovered some—this innovation, this one particular equation

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that allowed you to multiply two sines together by doing a lookup.

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Effectively, someone calculated the results in one particular

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way, laid them out in a book, and so if you needed to add sinX to

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sinY, or multiply sinX to sinY, you could look it up in this book.

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And he thought this was great.

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And he thought, I wonder if I can improve on this.

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So, he did.

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So, he came with his own version of it.

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Actually, sorry, that’s a lie.

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The algorithm that existed before him was slightly more

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complicated than just adding two looked up numbers.

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He managed to simplify it to this look up

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to, you know, sinX plus sinY, or thereabouts.

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And his version was specialized to astronomy.

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It was all about angles.

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But a friend of his, a guy called Henry Briggs,

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then generalized it to just base-ten numbers.

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So what, effectively, logarithms allow you to do is they allow

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you to multiply pretty much any two numbers together, purely by

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doing a lookup in a table and then adding two numbers together.

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And this is just incredible.

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Like, multiplication is complicated, and

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it takes, you know, it takes a long time.

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It’s painful to do by hand.

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Logarithms just blew all of that away.

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It made it possible to carry out much larger,

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much more complicated equations, much more simply.

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But that wasn’t as far as it went.

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The thing that happened next, you know, this is birth

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of the modern era, I suppose, lots of things are

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happening, lots of people are talking to one another.

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So, you have Napier talking to Henry Briggs, who comes

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up with this base-ten generalization of logarithms.

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And then another guy comes along called

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Edmund Gunter and invents the Gunter scale.

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And this is like a ruler, except instead of measuring

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distances, it has a logarithmic scale on it.

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So, if you imagine a normal ruler for measuring distance,

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the distances between any two adjacent numbers is the same.

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So, the distance between one and two is the same as

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the distance between two and three, and three and four

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and so on, whether it’s centimeters or inches or yards.

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The Gunter scale, the numbers get closer and closer together.

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So, they start off quite far apart.

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One and two are quite far apart, two and three

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are a bit closer, three and four are closer still.

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And this is because they were laid out according to Napier’s logarithmic scales.

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And then someone else, another guy called William Oughtred

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came along and realized that if you’ve laid two Gunter scales

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together, you could do multiplication without the lookup tables.

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You didn’t need them at all.

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So, now you’ve got a physical device that allows you to multiply effectively

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any two numbers to as much precision as the scale and your eyesight allows.

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And this, in some ways, was the first mechanical calculator.

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Like, I did find it hard to define what is a calculator, and so

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I think for me, the simplest thing—I guess one of the simplest

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definitions I came across was, some external device not within

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the human brain, that can add, subtract, multiply, divide.

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Now, humans can add and subtract relatively easily.

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Multiplication and division is where it gets harder.

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The slide rule cracks that nut and allows us to do those things.

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So, to me, the slide rule is effectively the first mathematical calculator.

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You mentioned going to school and seeing your first pocket calculator.

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I think for me, I started doing fairly serious maths at school

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a few years after scientific calculators have come on the scene.

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So, for me, seeing a slide rule was almost as much of

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a revelation [laugh] going in the opposite direction.

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Just, I was amazed.

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It’s like a magic stick.

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Right [laugh]

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.
There’s such genius embedded in this little device.

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Yeah.

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I had that kind of same experience that my grandfather’s slide

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rule was in our desk at home, and I remember looking—it was a

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very mysterious thing, but I thought it was really almost an

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object of art in a way it looks, it just, it fascinated me.

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I frankly, never learned how to use a slide rule, but I love the look.

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So, I feel shamed into that, now, Keith.

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I need to go back and take a look at those.

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But I think truly both very useful and I think very, very beautiful devices.

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What about this calculating machine?

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You talk about the Curta.

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Why did it stand out in, kind of, your story of the evolution of the calculator?

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The Curta is a really interesting calculator, and it’s almost the

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junction between mechanical calculators and electronic calculators.

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So, what happened was, slide rulers had existed for

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a few hundred years, well, a couple of hundred years.

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And in around about the 17th century, this new interest in mathematics came

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together with a new interest in, I guess, philosophy, but also clockwork, oddly.

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This was when, especially in Europe, and especially among the rich, clocks,

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and fairly shortly after that, watches were the luxury item to have.

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So, you had a real, especially in Germany, you had a really burgeoning

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class of people who were very good at making small mechanical devices.

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So, you know, watches, clocks are the obvious examples.

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But museums are full of these trinkets that rich people

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bought that had some sort of clockwork mechanism inside them.

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The British Museum has got a stag inside it that you can wind

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up and send it rolling along the dinner table to a companion,

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00:12:24,710 --> 00:12:27,854
and it has a little compartment in it for some wine, so when

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it reaches someone, they have to pick it up and drink the wine.

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That was typical.

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And then René Descartes, the French philosopher,

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thought of people and our minds as machines.

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There was just this general kind of—I guess it’s the birth of

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the notion of computing as some sort of mechanical operation.

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And so, all of this came together.

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And there were, I think, two or three different people in

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France, Germany, and the UK, who all roughly had an idea that

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perhaps we can carry a calculation in some mechanical way.

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Not quite at the same time, but perhaps the most important

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one was Pascal, a French philosopher and mathematician, and I

256
00:13:03,840 --> 00:13:07,010
guess, a quite significant writer on Christian themes as well.

257
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He managed to build something that wouldn’t have been recognized as

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a mechanical calculator for at least a good couple of hundred years.

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00:13:15,190 --> 00:13:18,609
So, it’s about the size of a typewriter or a shoebox, and

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had a number of dials along the front, and as you turned

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the dial, it would add a number to a little accumulator.

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So, it had a set of little windows along the top, and as

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you turned these dials in the bottom, it just added up, you

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know, the accumulators accepted the number from the bottom.

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And they would carry, so you know, as you go from nine to zero on

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one of the dials, it would carry the one to the next dial along.

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The carry mechanism on his machine was too fragile.

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It didn’t work very well, but someone else did manage to perfect—this

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was another French, actually an accountant, a sort of—I think again,

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00:13:52,970 --> 00:13:56,758
he was effectively, what an [insurance] pioneer, and he had been a

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quartermaster for the French army, for Napoleon’s army, a guy called

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Charles Xavier Thomas, and he perfected the carry mechanism, fundamentally.

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00:14:06,260 --> 00:14:10,060
And so, he devised this mathematical calculating device called an Arithmometer.

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And this was it.

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00:14:11,510 --> 00:14:14,030
This was the first genuinely practical, and to some

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extent, mass produced, mathematical calculator.

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It could add and subtract quite well, and it could have—so

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multiplied by, you could multiply by tens, very easily as well.

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At the heart of Thomas’ machine, the Arithmometer,

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was a component called the stepped drum.

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And it’s not easy to explain what a stepped drum is, but it’s almost worth

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00:14:36,889 --> 00:14:40,250
it because it helps explain how the Curta works and how it is an improvement.

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00:14:40,869 --> 00:14:46,955
So, the stepped drum was a drum, and it had around it a number of splines.

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It had nine splines, and they all start at the bottom.

285
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And as you move up the drum, the first one stops very

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short, then the second one stops a bit less short—or a bit

287
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longer—then the third one’s a bit longer still, and so on.

288
00:15:00,109 --> 00:15:02,650
And so, by the time we reach the top of the drum, by the time

289
00:15:02,650 --> 00:15:05,770
we reach spline number nine, it’s the full length of the drum.

290
00:15:06,550 --> 00:15:10,000
And what this means is, you could slide the drum forward or

291
00:15:10,020 --> 00:15:14,330
backwards in order to—so when you then crank the drum over one time,

292
00:15:14,330 --> 00:15:18,050
that tells you how many times an associated cog will be turned.

293
00:15:18,449 --> 00:15:21,330
So, if it’s slid all the way up, the associated cog moves by one

294
00:15:21,330 --> 00:15:24,290
tooth, or if you slide it all the way down, for example, then all

295
00:15:24,300 --> 00:15:27,600
nine splines engage it, and you add nine onto your accumulator.

296
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This was the principle behind the Arithmometer.

297
00:15:30,160 --> 00:15:33,970
Thomas’ Arithmometer had one drum per digit, and that made it quite bulky.

298
00:15:34,799 --> 00:15:38,170
The Curta had a single drum in the middle, and it had a

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00:15:38,170 --> 00:15:40,800
number of sliders arranged around the outside, and this

300
00:15:40,800 --> 00:15:44,470
meant that it was about the size of a Coke can, let’s say.

301
00:15:44,470 --> 00:15:47,660
It was a genuinely pocketable mechanical calculator.

302
00:15:47,660 --> 00:15:53,269
It was designed by a mechanical inventor called Curt Herzstark.

303
00:15:53,340 --> 00:15:58,640
He was born, I think, in Vienna in the early part of the 20th

304
00:15:58,640 --> 00:16:03,099
century, and he was the son of a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother.

305
00:16:03,620 --> 00:16:06,410
And this was extremely bad news for him.

306
00:16:06,410 --> 00:16:11,949
He ended up being sent to Buchenwald, which is effectively the most notorious

307
00:16:11,949 --> 00:16:15,560
of all of the concentration camps that the Nazis ran in the Second World War.

308
00:16:16,050 --> 00:16:19,350
And he only survived because he was recognized by one of

309
00:16:19,350 --> 00:16:22,970
his jailers, who knew that he was mechanically very adept.

310
00:16:23,880 --> 00:16:27,619
And he was interviewed by the camp commandant, effectively, who

311
00:16:27,620 --> 00:16:30,960
said, “If you work for us, if you continue to work on this mechanical

312
00:16:30,960 --> 00:16:34,110
calculator you’ve been developing, perhaps things will turn out okay for

313
00:16:34,110 --> 00:16:38,155
you.” In the end, the war ended before anything much happened on that

314
00:16:38,220 --> 00:16:42,260
front, but by that point, he’d completed enough of his designs, and he

315
00:16:42,260 --> 00:16:45,249
had survived, that meant that he was able to put it into production.

316
00:16:46,100 --> 00:16:50,100
No European governments were interested, except for one called Liechtenstein.

317
00:16:50,260 --> 00:16:52,530
Your listeners may or may not have heard of Liechtenstein,

318
00:16:52,530 --> 00:16:56,069
but it’s a tiny, little Alpine state, and it’s a principality.

319
00:16:56,139 --> 00:17:01,490
The Prince of Liechtenstein was interested and invested in Curt’s device.

320
00:17:01,599 --> 00:17:04,719
He called it the Curta, meaning effectively ‘Curt’s Daughter.’

321
00:17:05,010 --> 00:17:08,589
And as I said, it went on to become the first really effective,

322
00:17:08,650 --> 00:17:12,229
pocketable, mechanical calculator, and ironically, pretty much the

323
00:17:12,230 --> 00:17:15,490
last of its kind because at that point, semiconductors—or not even

324
00:17:15,490 --> 00:17:18,839
semiconductors, but electronics were becoming much more prominent.

325
00:17:18,849 --> 00:17:21,439
The Second World War, of course, many different countries

326
00:17:21,440 --> 00:17:24,139
had been looking into electronics for one reason or another,

327
00:17:24,139 --> 00:17:27,139
and computing, digital computing, was then on the rise.

328
00:17:27,150 --> 00:17:30,470
So, the Curt—this marvelous mechanical device that really was

329
00:17:30,470 --> 00:17:33,869
never replicated again, they go for quite high prices at auction.

330
00:17:33,910 --> 00:17:35,339
I’d love to try one.

331
00:17:35,650 --> 00:17:37,580
I’ve played with simulations of one, but I’ve never

332
00:17:37,580 --> 00:17:39,470
seen one in the flesh—or in the metal—I’m afraid.

333
00:17:40,020 --> 00:17:44,300
When I read this in your book, I thought, this is a movie waiting to be made.

334
00:17:44,310 --> 00:17:46,810
I mean, what an amazing story that is.

335
00:17:47,180 --> 00:17:50,430
The Curta is relatively well known, and the story behind it is

336
00:17:50,430 --> 00:17:54,330
relatively well known, but only in certain circles, and so yeah,

337
00:17:54,330 --> 00:17:56,080
if you know about it, you know everything about it, and if you

338
00:17:56,080 --> 00:17:59,369
don’t, you know nothing about it, is the way that I feel about it.

339
00:17:59,580 --> 00:18:02,350
You go on from that, you talk about Texas Instruments.

340
00:18:02,580 --> 00:18:07,370
I lived in Dallas, Texas for a while, and that was a big place there, still.

341
00:18:07,370 --> 00:18:12,739
And the Pocketronic, you talk about, produced by Texas Instruments and Canon.

342
00:18:12,910 --> 00:18:17,360
Why was that such a groundbreaking calculator, the Pocketronic?

343
00:18:18,160 --> 00:18:22,490
So, I mentioned how electronics—I have the same problem that I

344
00:18:22,490 --> 00:18:25,640
imagine lots of people have, which is, when we think electronics,

345
00:18:25,640 --> 00:18:28,249
we think silicon chips, but the two things are distinct.

346
00:18:28,889 --> 00:18:33,450
So, electronic computers had come of age during the Second World

347
00:18:33,450 --> 00:18:37,580
War, really, but they were still made of fairly clunky components.

348
00:18:37,590 --> 00:18:40,230
So, if the main or the most important component

349
00:18:40,310 --> 00:18:42,910
in an electronic computer is a switch.

350
00:18:43,480 --> 00:18:47,379
Then up until the ’50s, that would have been a valve, or a vacuum tube.

351
00:18:47,380 --> 00:18:49,380
So, in the UK, they’re typically called valves;

352
00:18:49,750 --> 00:18:51,570
in the US are typically called vacuum tubes.

353
00:18:51,570 --> 00:18:55,740
And this is a light bulb with an extra set of wires in it, more or less.

354
00:18:55,740 --> 00:18:59,679
That’s simplifying it slightly, but it can act as an amplifier or as a switch.

355
00:18:59,680 --> 00:19:03,960
It harks all the way back to a discovery by Thomas Edison, who

356
00:19:03,969 --> 00:19:06,719
had something incredible in his hands and he didn’t realize it.

357
00:19:06,719 --> 00:19:08,040
I mean, he did well for himself.

358
00:19:08,059 --> 00:19:10,500
He did [laugh]

359
00:19:10,520 --> 00:19:12,350
.
—I believe, but he did not go on to invent the computer.

360
00:19:12,730 --> 00:19:16,550
So, computers had been these massive, bulky, room-filling devices,

361
00:19:16,830 --> 00:19:19,530
comprised largely of vacuum tubes, which are prone to fusing,

362
00:19:19,530 --> 00:19:22,620
sort of blowing out just like normal incandescent light bulbs.

363
00:19:22,980 --> 00:19:24,320
And then along came the transistor.

364
00:19:24,320 --> 00:19:29,149
And the transistor was a similar amplifier or switch, but made on a

365
00:19:29,150 --> 00:19:33,379
single, tiny piece of a semiconductor material like germanium or silicon.

366
00:19:33,630 --> 00:19:39,380
TI—Texas Instruments—were fortunate enough to have hired a semiconductor

367
00:19:39,440 --> 00:19:43,139
engineer called Jack Kilby, who went on to figure out that, well, if we

368
00:19:43,139 --> 00:19:46,739
can make individual electronic components out of individual pieces of

369
00:19:46,739 --> 00:19:50,470
germanium or silicon, what if we just put them all on a single piece?

370
00:19:51,060 --> 00:19:53,240
And so, he effectively invented the microchip.

371
00:19:53,630 --> 00:19:56,139
He worked out that you can put multiple

372
00:19:56,139 --> 00:19:58,450
different components on a single silicon chip.

373
00:19:58,450 --> 00:20:02,959
And this then, this shrinks—a room-filling computer down to something tiny.

374
00:20:03,230 --> 00:20:07,209
The main application at that point had been for the US military.

375
00:20:07,230 --> 00:20:10,189
So, for example, all of the Minuteman missiles, which are

376
00:20:10,300 --> 00:20:13,530
scattered across the Midwest, had Texas Instrument chips

377
00:20:13,630 --> 00:20:15,920
in them so they could be guided towards their targets.

378
00:20:16,740 --> 00:20:20,120
But once you have enough nuclear missiles, you don’t need any more

379
00:20:20,130 --> 00:20:23,789
microchips, which is a simple way of saying that TI needed a new market.

380
00:20:24,229 --> 00:20:27,830
Now, what they’d done once before with transistors is they had

381
00:20:27,840 --> 00:20:31,520
designed a transistor radio, and they found a consumer electronics

382
00:20:31,520 --> 00:20:34,199
company in the US to manufacture it, I think, was called Regency.

383
00:20:34,530 --> 00:20:36,220
And so, they’d done very well.

384
00:20:36,230 --> 00:20:38,980
They managed to sell lots more transistors because they stimulated this

385
00:20:38,980 --> 00:20:43,070
market, they stimulated the market for transistors by selling a device

386
00:20:43,090 --> 00:20:46,390
to use them, and they wanted to do the same thing with microchips.

387
00:20:46,430 --> 00:20:48,400
They needed a civilian market for microchips.

388
00:20:48,680 --> 00:20:53,600
And so, Pat Haggerty, the TI boss, and Jack Kilby had been on a plane one day,

389
00:20:53,860 --> 00:20:57,259
and the story is that they took off, they started discussing what they could do.

390
00:20:57,259 --> 00:21:00,259
By the time they landed, they had decided they were going to build a

391
00:21:00,259 --> 00:21:03,500
pocketable calculator, which would have been unthought-of at that point.

392
00:21:03,640 --> 00:21:07,473
The closest that had happened up to that point, I think, was—well, there

393
00:21:07,473 --> 00:21:10,990
were desktop calculators that use microchips, but TI were good at microchips.

394
00:21:11,020 --> 00:21:12,809
They wanted to demonstrate how good they

395
00:21:12,809 --> 00:21:15,700
were, and so they designed the microchips.

396
00:21:15,920 --> 00:21:19,380
They figured out that a display that is visible to the user, that

397
00:21:19,389 --> 00:21:22,620
lights up, a digital display would be too expensive, and so they came

398
00:21:22,620 --> 00:21:26,239
up with a very clever solid state printer instead, which meant that the

399
00:21:26,240 --> 00:21:29,449
calculator was only consuming energy as it was actually calculating.

400
00:21:29,450 --> 00:21:31,889
It didn’t have to light up the display the whole time.

401
00:21:32,110 --> 00:21:33,169
But they didn’t want to build it.

402
00:21:33,500 --> 00:21:36,139
They designed this thing, they you know, they designed

403
00:21:36,150 --> 00:21:38,420
the insides and the outsides, the user interface.

404
00:21:38,650 --> 00:21:41,219
They ended up partnering with Canon, who at that time were

405
00:21:41,219 --> 00:21:44,170
a—well, they still are—Japanese electronics manufacturer.

406
00:21:44,170 --> 00:21:45,699
They started out making cameras.

407
00:21:46,360 --> 00:21:49,170
They got into making electronics because they needed to make better lenses.

408
00:21:49,179 --> 00:21:51,250
They needed to measure things and engineer them better.

409
00:21:51,630 --> 00:21:55,840
And they were just part of this big swell of companies in Japan.

410
00:21:55,840 --> 00:21:58,060
I suppose it was the first big offshoring boom for this sort

411
00:21:58,060 --> 00:22:01,250
of thing that were just taking lots of business from the US.

412
00:22:01,250 --> 00:22:04,000
The US would typically make the very difficult stuff like microchips,

413
00:22:04,480 --> 00:22:07,310
and then ship them over to Japan to have them assembled into machines

414
00:22:07,349 --> 00:22:10,240
because labor was cheaper over there for the slightly lower tech stuff.

415
00:22:10,359 --> 00:22:14,030
Canon was their chosen partner, and so that was all great.

416
00:22:14,140 --> 00:22:18,370
And then TI took just a bit long to actually bring these chips into production.

417
00:22:18,370 --> 00:22:20,670
They had lots of problems with yield.

418
00:22:20,700 --> 00:22:23,179
They couldn’t make enough of these chips, and so by the time the

419
00:22:23,450 --> 00:22:26,420
Pocketronic is—which is what Canon called it—came on the market.

420
00:22:27,000 --> 00:22:27,969
It looked old-fashioned.

421
00:22:27,980 --> 00:22:30,610
It was only a few years old, but already looked obsolete because there

422
00:22:30,610 --> 00:22:34,530
were other, frankly better pocket calculators at that point already.

423
00:22:34,530 --> 00:22:35,920
So, it’s a real shame.

424
00:22:36,400 --> 00:22:38,770
They were very definitely the pioneers, but they did

425
00:22:38,770 --> 00:22:41,750
not build the first pocketable electronic calculator.

426
00:22:42,030 --> 00:22:46,729
And that really goes to the firm—what’s it—Busicom HANDY-LE.

427
00:22:47,320 --> 00:22:50,750
So that’s, if I recall correctly, the first one.

428
00:22:51,060 --> 00:22:51,420
It is.

429
00:22:51,450 --> 00:22:52,050
It is indeed.

430
00:22:52,060 --> 00:22:55,800
Busicom is, I think it’s a contraction of ‘business’ and ‘computer’—

431
00:22:56,030 --> 00:22:56,370
Got it.

432
00:22:57,790 --> 00:22:57,860
There you go.

433
00:22:57,860 --> 00:22:57,939
—so [unintelligible] it’s Busicom.

434
00:22:57,939 --> 00:23:00,570
And this is a fascinating story, really.

435
00:23:00,590 --> 00:23:06,329
They were a relatively small company that made electronic calculators in Japan.

436
00:23:07,010 --> 00:23:10,830
I think they’d made mechanical calculators, and moved on to electronic ones.

437
00:23:11,420 --> 00:23:14,850
And at this point, which is, I think, the early-’70s,

438
00:23:15,200 --> 00:23:19,050
some American chip manufacturers were making chips

439
00:23:19,130 --> 00:23:21,420
that were basically an entire calculator on a chip.

440
00:23:21,420 --> 00:23:24,059
It’s everything, apart from the display, the keyboard, and the batteries.

441
00:23:24,469 --> 00:23:28,070
So, all of the logic that was required to do the calculation, to have

442
00:23:28,070 --> 00:23:32,590
a memory function, to drive the display was embedded in a single chip.

443
00:23:32,840 --> 00:23:35,620
And so, Busicom thought, great, we are going to build

444
00:23:35,620 --> 00:23:38,120
a pocket calculator with one of these single chips.

445
00:23:38,120 --> 00:23:38,580
And they did.

446
00:23:38,960 --> 00:23:39,779
That was the HANDY-LE.

447
00:23:39,779 --> 00:23:43,110
It was about the size of a packet of cigarettes or thereabouts.

448
00:23:43,120 --> 00:23:44,850
It was fabulously expensive at the time.

449
00:23:45,120 --> 00:23:49,520
But, yeah, that was pretty much the earliest pocket calculator.

450
00:23:49,900 --> 00:23:53,540
But Busicom are maybe better known for,

451
00:23:53,570 --> 00:23:55,539
ironically, a less well known calculator.

452
00:23:55,880 --> 00:23:59,020
They had this idea of building a family of chips.

453
00:23:59,049 --> 00:24:02,570
So, not just here’s a calculator on a chip, but let’s think,

454
00:24:02,970 --> 00:24:06,280
okay, we’ll have an arithmetic chip, and we’ll have one for

455
00:24:06,280 --> 00:24:08,730
driving printers, and we’ll have one for driving visible

456
00:24:08,730 --> 00:24:11,779
displays, we’ll have one for interfacing with different machines.

457
00:24:12,020 --> 00:24:15,009
So, they thought, we can build a cash register with this, with

458
00:24:15,009 --> 00:24:18,909
this family of chips, or an ATM, or, indeed, a calculator.

459
00:24:19,130 --> 00:24:20,620
They couldn’t make the chips themselves.

460
00:24:20,620 --> 00:24:22,530
They could design all the logic circuits, but they didn’t

461
00:24:22,530 --> 00:24:24,590
have the expertise to actually manufacture the chips.

462
00:24:25,150 --> 00:24:29,530
They were put in touch with a little startup in the US called Intel—

463
00:24:29,679 --> 00:24:29,973
Oh, yes [laugh]

464
00:24:29,973 --> 00:24:31,600
.
—who were making memory chips at that time.

465
00:24:32,219 --> 00:24:36,210
And they went to Intel, they said, we’d like you to make these chips for us.

466
00:24:36,230 --> 00:24:38,959
And Intel said, we will take your business.

467
00:24:38,990 --> 00:24:41,880
Unfortunately, we do not have enough people to do this for you.

468
00:24:41,880 --> 00:24:43,430
And so, they proposed a different model.

469
00:24:43,930 --> 00:24:45,960
I think Busicom had [wanted] , I think it was

470
00:24:45,969 --> 00:24:49,010
more than ten chips in this family, this chip set.

471
00:24:49,490 --> 00:24:51,090
Intel thought we can do it with four.

472
00:24:51,540 --> 00:24:55,049
We can do it with a memory chip to store working information;

473
00:24:55,660 --> 00:24:58,659
a ROM which is a read-only memory, so it provides instructions;

474
00:24:58,920 --> 00:25:01,560
shift register, which is basically for input-output; and

475
00:25:01,580 --> 00:25:04,939
crucially, with a single chip to pull it all together.

476
00:25:04,980 --> 00:25:06,710
They called it a Central Processing Unit.

477
00:25:07,400 --> 00:25:13,910
This was the Intel 4004, basically the first widely available microcomputer CPU.

478
00:25:15,450 --> 00:25:18,990
And Intel did all of this so that Busicom could make a very boring,

479
00:25:19,000 --> 00:25:21,980
a very beige, desktop calculator with a printer built into it.

480
00:25:22,599 --> 00:25:26,470
All computing, the devices we’re talking on now, our phones, everything, really,

481
00:25:26,759 --> 00:25:30,699
in some way, owes its existence this one exceptionally boring calculator.

482
00:25:30,709 --> 00:25:32,780
And as I said, I think no one knows about this.

483
00:25:32,780 --> 00:25:36,239
The HANDY-LE is somewhat known because it’s the first pocket calculator.

484
00:25:36,520 --> 00:25:39,840
But, yeah, but Busicom, kind of, has since disappeared.

485
00:25:40,129 --> 00:25:43,030
Intel’s not looking too hot these days, but the

486
00:25:43,030 --> 00:25:44,700
legacy of all this very much still lives on.

487
00:25:44,870 --> 00:25:46,849
So, tell me, what timeframe are we talking?

488
00:25:46,850 --> 00:25:49,110
When was this happening with the HANDY-LE?

489
00:25:49,110 --> 00:25:53,260
The HANDY-LE was, if I remember the 1970s.

490
00:25:53,310 --> 00:25:54,100
1971.

491
00:25:56,179 --> 00:25:56,189
1971.

492
00:25:56,190 --> 00:26:00,360
You’re reminding me, I always have pop culture references—Matt will tell

493
00:26:00,360 --> 00:26:04,659
you that—a couple years ago, I was watching an old American detective

494
00:26:04,850 --> 00:26:09,280
series called Banacek with the great George Peppard in the lead role,

495
00:26:09,580 --> 00:26:13,940
and one of the episodes focused on the disappearance of a computer.

496
00:26:14,210 --> 00:26:17,920
And the computer took up the whole room, so the line in that was,

497
00:26:18,020 --> 00:26:20,954
“No one just walks away with a computer.” I love that [laugh]

498
00:26:21,479 --> 00:26:21,509
.
[laugh]

499
00:26:21,870 --> 00:26:24,479
.
And not to spoil it, was all done with mirrors, so the computer

500
00:26:24,480 --> 00:26:28,379
was still there, by the way, but it showed you how quickly time and

501
00:26:28,380 --> 00:26:31,720
technology had changed, for sure [laugh] . Another company that got into

502
00:26:31,720 --> 00:26:37,129
the mix that you talk about in Empire of the Sum is Hewlett Packard.

503
00:26:37,730 --> 00:26:41,920
They had a calculator called the HP-35 that was pretty revolutionary.

504
00:26:41,920 --> 00:26:43,479
Why was that so important?

505
00:26:44,060 --> 00:26:48,520
The HP-35, in some ways, doesn’t look revolutionary if

506
00:26:48,870 --> 00:26:51,810
you know that, for example, the Busicom HANDY-LE exists.

507
00:26:52,160 --> 00:26:53,629
You know it’s 1971.

508
00:26:53,830 --> 00:26:56,189
Why, it’s the first electronic pocket calculator.

509
00:26:56,630 --> 00:27:00,290
Then the HP-35 is perhaps not super exciting.

510
00:27:00,290 --> 00:27:04,350
But what it was still—it was a pocketable calculator.

511
00:27:04,630 --> 00:27:05,940
It was quite well designed.

512
00:27:06,170 --> 00:27:08,260
A fair amount of thought went into the enclosure,

513
00:27:08,270 --> 00:27:10,261
how the buttons were arranged, and so on.

514
00:27:10,261 --> 00:27:11,920
And it had 35 buttons, hence the name.

515
00:27:12,450 --> 00:27:14,169
But this was a scientific calculator.

516
00:27:14,170 --> 00:27:17,109
This was something that could do proper—or you could solve proper

517
00:27:17,109 --> 00:27:20,750
engineering-grade problems with, whereas previously, a calculator

518
00:27:20,750 --> 00:27:22,970
that could do that sort of thing would take up your desk.

519
00:27:23,110 --> 00:27:24,010
This was revolutionary.

520
00:27:24,010 --> 00:27:25,830
This was Moore’s law in action.

521
00:27:25,880 --> 00:27:28,670
The chips were tinier, the complexity was much higher.

522
00:27:29,020 --> 00:27:33,659
And I think what the HP-35 did well was it took all of the smarts that

523
00:27:33,659 --> 00:27:37,320
HP had, all of the algorithms they developed to do very complicated

524
00:27:37,870 --> 00:27:42,639
engineering problems, and figured out how to embed them on these chips.

525
00:27:42,650 --> 00:27:46,750
So, it wasn’t as clever as Busicom’s desktop calculator; it

526
00:27:46,750 --> 00:27:51,020
wasn’t as clever as Intel’s chip set; it was just a very finely

527
00:27:51,020 --> 00:27:55,040
honed application of the special purpose chip, I guess, that had

528
00:27:55,190 --> 00:27:57,889
gone—you know, we’re going to build a single chip for calculator.

529
00:27:58,080 --> 00:27:59,590
It just pushed that to its limits.

530
00:27:59,830 --> 00:28:01,720
And there was something about it, in some ways, as

531
00:28:01,720 --> 00:28:04,950
I said, the HP-35 does not initially appear super

532
00:28:04,950 --> 00:28:08,549
interesting, but something about it caught the imagination.

533
00:28:08,660 --> 00:28:12,140
Engineering students would sell their cars so they could buy HP-35s.

534
00:28:12,640 --> 00:28:15,180
NASA scientists would buy them, and then they’d be stolen.

535
00:28:15,390 --> 00:28:18,980
So, there was a short-lived fad for lockable calculator

536
00:28:18,990 --> 00:28:21,910
boxes so that you could store your calculator safely.

537
00:28:22,090 --> 00:28:25,510
There were some maths instructors in the US Army that created a course

538
00:28:25,570 --> 00:28:28,799
solely so they could give themselves an excuse to buy some HP-35s.

539
00:28:29,049 --> 00:28:29,639
This was like an iPhone.

540
00:28:29,639 --> 00:28:32,790
It had that same sort of consumer electronics,

541
00:28:32,950 --> 00:28:34,460
or made a splash in a similar way.

542
00:28:34,520 --> 00:28:38,550
And in fact, not having been shopping for consumer electronics in 1972,

543
00:28:38,550 --> 00:28:43,510
I’m not sure how true this is, but I’ve seen it said that the HP-35

544
00:28:43,580 --> 00:28:46,990
created the concept of a must-have device: what’s the next big thing?

545
00:28:47,010 --> 00:28:50,800
It was the first big thing, the first thing that took people into the shops

546
00:28:50,810 --> 00:28:53,629
to buy this one thing that they must have, whether they needed it or not.

547
00:28:54,480 --> 00:28:56,770
So, it had a huge, it had an outsized impact, I think.

548
00:28:57,059 --> 00:28:58,575
Have you used an HP-35?

549
00:28:59,130 --> 00:29:00,000
I’ve seen one.

550
00:29:01,400 --> 00:29:01,556
I’ve never used one before, unfortunately.

551
00:29:01,570 --> 00:29:04,399
I keep one trolling eBay, looking for them, but unfortunately not.

552
00:29:04,399 --> 00:29:08,590
[laugh] . Now, the next calculator I want to talk about, though I’m pretty

553
00:29:08,590 --> 00:29:14,250
sure I have used, the TI’s 81 that really was in classrooms around the world.

554
00:29:14,250 --> 00:29:16,780
Can you tell us a bit about the TI-81?

555
00:29:16,780 --> 00:29:17,330
Yes.

556
00:29:17,530 --> 00:29:21,060
TI, of course, they started making calculators, or designing

557
00:29:21,060 --> 00:29:24,309
calculators back in the late-’60s with the Pocketronic.

558
00:29:24,519 --> 00:29:26,429
They eventually realized they didn’t want to outsource

559
00:29:26,429 --> 00:29:29,530
things, so they built a, kind of, vertically integrated

560
00:29:29,590 --> 00:29:32,520
ability to make—they started off making components.

561
00:29:32,530 --> 00:29:34,780
So, they already made chips, then they started making keyboards

562
00:29:34,929 --> 00:29:37,530
and displays, and finally, they started making the enclosures

563
00:29:37,530 --> 00:29:39,820
themselves, so they could build a calculator from scratch.

564
00:29:40,190 --> 00:29:44,510
Calculators in… I think, particularly in the education

565
00:29:44,520 --> 00:29:48,860
in the US, started to get a lot of attention.

566
00:29:49,270 --> 00:29:52,950
There were a couple of teachers at Ohio State University that

567
00:29:53,110 --> 00:29:56,970
started to use calculators in one of their remedial maths classes,

568
00:29:57,580 --> 00:30:00,870
and they thought this is going to be useful for two reasons.

569
00:30:00,880 --> 00:30:03,120
One is, students who are having trouble with

570
00:30:03,400 --> 00:30:05,820
maths may be attracted by the shiny new gadgets.

571
00:30:05,820 --> 00:30:08,110
I guess, maybe the HP-35 was rubbing off a bit.

572
00:30:08,450 --> 00:30:11,260
If it’s easier for them to do simpler problems, they can concentrate

573
00:30:11,260 --> 00:30:13,689
on the more abstract concepts: ‘What are we trying to model

574
00:30:13,690 --> 00:30:16,459
here,’ not ‘How do I multiply these two large numbers together?

575
00:30:16,469 --> 00:30:17,760
How do I compute a square root?’

576
00:30:18,029 --> 00:30:20,970
If you can forget those things, you can start to think about what’s

577
00:30:20,970 --> 00:30:24,170
the underlying process or equation that we’re trying to model here?

578
00:30:24,560 --> 00:30:25,490
And it seemed to work.

579
00:30:26,010 --> 00:30:29,419
So, calculators started to gather pace.

580
00:30:30,080 --> 00:30:33,840
And TI actually looked at Casio in Japan.

581
00:30:33,840 --> 00:30:38,210
Casio had released a graphing calculator, which I suspect

582
00:30:38,210 --> 00:30:40,940
at the time, must have been as exciting as the HP-35.

583
00:30:40,940 --> 00:30:43,250
Here’s a calculator that can not only tell you

584
00:30:43,250 --> 00:30:45,910
the result of some calculation, but graph it.

585
00:30:46,450 --> 00:30:50,879
They can graph whatever you like, or 2D function you like.

586
00:30:51,240 --> 00:30:55,130
And so, TI basically cloned the Casio x-7000G.

587
00:30:56,150 --> 00:30:59,290
They used the same chip, I think, a chip called the Z80, which

588
00:30:59,290 --> 00:31:01,750
ended up being in many, many different computing devices.

589
00:31:02,050 --> 00:31:05,990
It had the same sort of functions, it was the same size, the same broad shape.

590
00:31:06,349 --> 00:31:07,790
It became very successful.

591
00:31:07,790 --> 00:31:11,441
It became the graphing calculator that anyone in the US who

592
00:31:11,441 --> 00:31:13,780
had to do any kind of advanced mathematics would get used to.

593
00:31:13,780 --> 00:31:14,950
You know, you’ve mentioned it.

594
00:31:15,190 --> 00:31:17,260
My wife is American; she talked about using one

595
00:31:17,260 --> 00:31:20,600
of the successors, I think, the TI-83 or 84.

596
00:31:20,820 --> 00:31:24,390
And so, there has been a long line of these,

597
00:31:24,400 --> 00:31:26,539
just gradually enhanced TI calculators.

598
00:31:26,710 --> 00:31:29,359
You can still buy a Texas Instruments graphing calculator

599
00:31:29,359 --> 00:31:33,170
that runs on a Z80 chip now, which just, the mind boggles.

600
00:31:33,250 --> 00:31:37,149
It’s so commoditized now and this chip was so well designed,

601
00:31:37,200 --> 00:31:39,740
incidentally, by one of the designers of the Intel 4004,

602
00:31:41,020 --> 00:31:42,910
I think it’s actually binary-compatible with the 8008.

603
00:31:43,790 --> 00:31:49,480
But yeah, so the TI-81 spawned this huge dynasty of graphing calculators.

604
00:31:49,720 --> 00:31:52,230
And then TI, I don’t know it’s a horrible thing

605
00:31:52,230 --> 00:31:53,770
to say, but I think they got a bit greedy.

606
00:31:54,000 --> 00:31:56,700
They didn’t want to lose the market that—you know, so

607
00:31:56,710 --> 00:31:59,249
basically, Casio and TI kind of shared the market for

608
00:31:59,250 --> 00:32:02,229
these graphing calculators, and TI got into lobbying.

609
00:32:02,460 --> 00:32:06,260
They started to push for Texas Instruments calculators to be the ones on the

610
00:32:06,270 --> 00:32:11,460
list of allowed devices for exams, the ones that are recommended to students.

611
00:32:11,880 --> 00:32:15,399
They made deals with textbook publishers, such that when you read through your

612
00:32:15,400 --> 00:32:18,320
maths textbook and it says, “This is how you graph this on your calculator,”

613
00:32:18,330 --> 00:32:21,600
it would be, “This is how you graph this on your TI-81 calculator.”

614
00:32:21,880 --> 00:32:23,480
So, the pictures in there are pictures of the

615
00:32:23,480 --> 00:32:26,270
TI-81, the keys in there are the keys of the TI-81.

616
00:32:26,270 --> 00:32:30,500
And it reached a head when they tried to lobby the Texas state government

617
00:32:30,530 --> 00:32:34,289
to make a particular algebra course mandatory in high school, which I’m

618
00:32:34,290 --> 00:32:37,620
sure would not have gone down well with generations of high school students.

619
00:32:37,780 --> 00:32:40,550
I think that failed, but you know, there are again, there are

620
00:32:40,600 --> 00:32:45,320
anecdotes of teachers saying that they have to provide TI-81 to

621
00:32:45,320 --> 00:32:48,530
their students, they get stolen, and they have to visit pawn shops to

622
00:32:48,530 --> 00:32:52,019
buy them back again because [laugh] the students with light fingers

623
00:32:52,020 --> 00:32:55,270
have decided to steal them, and sell them on to make a bit of money.

624
00:32:55,920 --> 00:33:00,449
So yeah, the TI-81 in itself, again, in some ways, is not super interesting.

625
00:33:00,459 --> 00:33:04,690
It was more or less a clone of existing calculator, but how sticky

626
00:33:04,690 --> 00:33:07,820
it became inside the US education system was quite striking.

627
00:33:07,930 --> 00:33:08,680
Yeah, it was everywhere.

628
00:33:09,030 --> 00:33:10,830
And Casio, though, stayed in that market.

629
00:33:10,840 --> 00:33:13,810
They continued and competed pretty well with TI, right?

630
00:33:14,060 --> 00:33:17,269
They did indeed, and especially over in Europe.

631
00:33:17,389 --> 00:33:22,540
If TI is the default in the States, from my memory, it was very much Casio.

632
00:33:22,550 --> 00:33:24,500
All of the calculators were Casio.

633
00:33:24,640 --> 00:33:25,429
I didn’t go into it.

634
00:33:25,440 --> 00:33:26,550
My publisher, W.

635
00:33:26,550 --> 00:33:26,770
W.

636
00:33:26,770 --> 00:33:27,850
Norton, is American.

637
00:33:28,130 --> 00:33:29,509
As I said, my wife is American.

638
00:33:29,509 --> 00:33:33,700
I think I end up looking at things through a kind of an

639
00:33:33,700 --> 00:33:36,730
Atlantic lens, and a sort of transatlantic lens in some sense.

640
00:33:36,740 --> 00:33:39,010
But I’m sure if I looked into it, perhaps would find Casio

641
00:33:39,620 --> 00:33:42,649
also may have done exactly the same sort of thing, I guess.

642
00:33:42,700 --> 00:33:44,540
Once you’re in a certain market, you don’t want to let go of it.

643
00:33:44,790 --> 00:33:46,280
That’s right [laugh] . That’s very true.

644
00:33:47,620 --> 00:33:47,690
Very true.

645
00:33:47,690 --> 00:33:51,070
And you do mention in your book something I ran into and remember as a kid,

646
00:33:51,410 --> 00:33:54,940
is that when calculators—and I’m sufficiently old to say this—when they really

647
00:33:54,940 --> 00:33:59,320
first started being on the scene in schools, at least in the Commonwealth

648
00:33:59,320 --> 00:34:03,240
of Kentucky, where I grew up, you weren’t allowed to use them at first.

649
00:34:03,309 --> 00:34:04,539
And then later, they became more and more

650
00:34:04,550 --> 00:34:06,550
integrated into, it’s okay to use them.

651
00:34:06,550 --> 00:34:11,019
But there was that gray area, and then it was okay, but at first it

652
00:34:11,020 --> 00:34:15,150
was like cheating, you know, if you used a calculator in math class.

653
00:34:15,150 --> 00:34:18,129
So, how did they respond here, perhaps in Europe

654
00:34:18,130 --> 00:34:21,339
as well, to that use in the classroom setting?

655
00:34:22,000 --> 00:34:23,069
That’s a really interesting one.

656
00:34:23,440 --> 00:34:27,080
I think the answer is that most teachers initially freaked out.

657
00:34:27,599 --> 00:34:30,660
Almost every new information technology

658
00:34:30,660 --> 00:34:32,830
seems to come with a built-in moral panic.

659
00:34:33,010 --> 00:34:37,290
The story of hieroglyphics, or the myth behind hieroglyphics,

660
00:34:37,290 --> 00:34:40,899
is that it was handed down to mankind by the God Thoth, and

661
00:34:41,040 --> 00:34:43,800
the mythical Egyptian king who received it turned around and

662
00:34:43,800 --> 00:34:45,999
said, well, thanks, but now we’re just going to forget stuff.

663
00:34:46,340 --> 00:34:48,280
So, [laugh] right from the very beginning, the very

664
00:34:48,380 --> 00:34:51,230
earliest information technology, it was seen as a bad thing.

665
00:34:51,489 --> 00:34:55,520
There was a kind of a debate for a long time between pen-and-paper

666
00:34:55,570 --> 00:34:58,890
mathematicians and abacists, people who used abacuses.

667
00:34:58,900 --> 00:35:02,290
Again, there was, you know, pen-and-paper was seen in some way as

668
00:35:02,290 --> 00:35:05,250
inferior to the abacus, which was the incumbent device at that point.

669
00:35:05,969 --> 00:35:09,975
Then mobile phones came along, you know, television, now AI.

670
00:35:10,250 --> 00:35:13,840
So, every significant information technology makes us

671
00:35:14,040 --> 00:35:17,489
question it and ourselves, you know, over and over again.

672
00:35:17,880 --> 00:35:19,120
And calculators were the same.

673
00:35:19,410 --> 00:35:20,360
It was the same worry.

674
00:35:20,370 --> 00:35:24,179
If you learn how to add, and subtract, and multiply, and divide using a

675
00:35:24,180 --> 00:35:28,680
calculator, what if you can’t ever do it in your head or on a piece of paper?

676
00:35:29,290 --> 00:35:30,960
And honestly, that’s correct.

677
00:35:31,050 --> 00:35:33,370
But we are now freed in the same way that

678
00:35:33,740 --> 00:35:35,620
the remedial students of OSU were freed.

679
00:35:35,870 --> 00:35:38,550
We’re now freed to think about the higher-level stuff.

680
00:35:39,030 --> 00:35:41,929
You know, we can sit back and think more

681
00:35:41,930 --> 00:35:43,930
clearly about the larger-scale problems.

682
00:35:44,160 --> 00:35:47,680
So, I think the thing happened that teachers

683
00:35:47,680 --> 00:35:50,110
were worried about, and it also doesn’t matter.

684
00:35:50,620 --> 00:35:52,120
Like, we have tools, we’re humans.

685
00:35:52,120 --> 00:35:56,040
We’re nothing, if not beings—what separates us from other animals?

686
00:35:56,270 --> 00:35:56,780
Tools.

687
00:35:56,870 --> 00:35:57,589
Writing, right?

688
00:35:57,610 --> 00:36:00,030
All of these things make us human.

689
00:36:00,119 --> 00:36:02,680
So, I don’t think we should feel too bad if we can’t

690
00:36:02,720 --> 00:36:05,050
multiply or divide large numbers in our heads anymore.

691
00:36:05,400 --> 00:36:07,360
Well, I feel much better about myself, then.

692
00:36:07,790 --> 00:36:10,220
That was always my worst field, Keith, my

693
00:36:10,220 --> 00:36:13,540
worst, so calculators were a revelation for me.

694
00:36:13,910 --> 00:36:16,200
Well, I so enjoyed Empire of the Sum.

695
00:36:16,200 --> 00:36:17,459
I enjoy all your work.

696
00:36:17,930 --> 00:36:19,310
What’s next for you?

697
00:36:19,890 --> 00:36:24,850
It is a book called Face With Tears of Joy, which is about emoji.

698
00:36:25,170 --> 00:36:28,819
So, it’s almost a sequel to my first book Shady

699
00:36:28,820 --> 00:36:31,570
Characters, which was about unusual marks of punctuation.

700
00:36:31,950 --> 00:36:38,020
I started just sort of writing about emoji in a similar way a few years ago.

701
00:36:38,070 --> 00:36:41,480
And yeah, I just felt like it was right for being turned into a book.

702
00:36:42,230 --> 00:36:45,149
Emoji went through quite a lot of turmoil in the last few years.

703
00:36:45,920 --> 00:36:48,280
I was going to say, actually, I would recommend that you buy the book.

704
00:36:48,280 --> 00:36:50,270
There’s a lot in there about governance bodies.

705
00:36:50,400 --> 00:36:52,609
If you enjoy tales of committee meetings, then this

706
00:36:52,629 --> 00:36:55,090
thing will just—this will knock your socks off.

707
00:36:55,090 --> 00:36:59,120
But there was a lot of concern about how emoji is managed.

708
00:36:59,120 --> 00:37:01,110
It’s just such an interesting subject.

709
00:37:01,110 --> 00:37:05,740
Emoji are not a language, but they display the characteristics of a language.

710
00:37:07,170 --> 00:37:09,730
They’re quite democratic in some senses, and

711
00:37:09,730 --> 00:37:12,310
also they’re not democratic at all in others.

712
00:37:12,380 --> 00:37:13,240
And they’re everywhere.

713
00:37:13,440 --> 00:37:16,109
[About] the calculators, at least with calculators, we

714
00:37:16,110 --> 00:37:18,460
somewhat—hmm, actually, no, the same thing is true of emoji.

715
00:37:18,810 --> 00:37:21,750
Some people are worried about, like, what are the morals of using a calculator?

716
00:37:21,750 --> 00:37:24,250
People worry about one of the morals of using an emoji.

717
00:37:24,940 --> 00:37:27,390
You know, there are books on etiquette that

718
00:37:27,390 --> 00:37:29,970
tell you when you can and can’t use emoji.

719
00:37:29,970 --> 00:37:32,510
So, they’re just another information technology, and they

720
00:37:32,510 --> 00:37:34,629
raise the same questions, they ask the same things of

721
00:37:34,630 --> 00:37:37,399
us as all of these other information technologies did.

722
00:37:37,990 --> 00:37:40,580
I’m giving a big smiley face to that idea.

723
00:37:40,580 --> 00:37:41,860
I’m looking forward to it, Keith.

724
00:37:42,770 --> 00:37:45,770
And again, thank you so much for joining us in AMSEcast.

725
00:37:46,100 --> 00:37:47,320
Really great conversation.

726
00:37:47,639 --> 00:37:48,150
Not at all.

727
00:37:48,160 --> 00:37:49,080
Thank you, again, for having me.

728
00:37:54,120 --> 00:37:56,810
Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast.

729
00:37:57,220 --> 00:38:01,550
For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at

730
00:38:01,820 --> 00:38:08,189
AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

731
00:38:08,690 --> 00:38:11,010
I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science

732
00:38:11,010 --> 00:38:13,810
and Energy and the K-25 History Center in person.

733
00:38:14,130 --> 00:38:18,299
You can also shop at our online store and become a member at AMSE.org.

734
00:38:18,759 --> 00:38:22,200
Thanks to our production team with Matt Mullins, plus our supportive colleagues

735
00:38:22,200 --> 00:38:26,040
at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Office of Environmental

736
00:38:26,040 --> 00:38:30,029
Management, and Office of Legacy Management, as well as Oak Ridge National

737
00:38:30,030 --> 00:38:35,870
Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, NNSA, and the AMSE Foundation.

738
00:38:36,370 --> 00:38:38,109
And of course, thanks to our wonderful guests

739
00:38:38,110 --> 00:38:39,939
today, and to all of you for listening.

740
00:38:40,420 --> 00:38:43,159
I hope you’ll join us for the next episode of AMSEcast.

741
00:38:45,820 --> 00:38:48,790
If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, I would like to ask that you consider

742
00:38:48,790 --> 00:38:53,359
becoming a member of the 117 Society, the newest membership opportunity

743
00:38:53,420 --> 00:38:56,880
offered by the American Museum of Science and Energy Foundation.

744
00:38:57,650 --> 00:39:00,830
By joining the 117 Society, you will help us continue

745
00:39:00,830 --> 00:39:03,630
this podcast and our other innovative programming.

746
00:39:04,020 --> 00:39:06,950
You will support the expansion of our vitally important educational

747
00:39:06,950 --> 00:39:10,810
outreach, including virtual classes, and you will help ensure that both

748
00:39:10,820 --> 00:39:15,450
the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center can

749
00:39:15,450 --> 00:39:19,560
continue to provide world-class exhibits to our community and to the world.

750
00:39:20,360 --> 00:39:23,230
Benefits of membership includes special access to video

751
00:39:23,230 --> 00:39:27,440
and audio content, and 117 Society merchandise, as well

752
00:39:27,440 --> 00:39:30,369
as all the benefits of our Atom Splitter Membership Level.

753
00:39:30,969 --> 00:39:33,260
To learn more, go to AMSE.org.

754
00:39:34,340 --> 00:39:39,130
The 117 Society is vital to the future of AMSE and the K-25 History Center.

755
00:39:39,530 --> 00:39:42,180
I hope you will consider joining, and thank you very much.