Building the Empire of the Sum with Keith Houston

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to AMSEcast. We very much appreciate your joining us for what is sure to be a fascinating episode. Our guest is author Keith Houston, whose work has been featured in publications like The New York Times, BBC Culture and the Wall Street Journal.

0:49 He’s the creator of the Shady Characters blog, and his books include Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, and the work we will discuss today, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator. Keith, thanks so much for joining us on AMSEcast. Not at all. Thank you for having me. I will tell you, my next work of yours I must read is The Book because I’m obsessed with books. The staff here will tell you, my poor wife will tell you, I’m a bit overwhelmed with them. And we started a nice book collection here at AMSE, I think, a good reference book collection that they very nicely called the Lowe Library.

1:33 I did not ask for that [laugh] . So again, thanks so much for joining us. I loved Empire of the Sum. This really—I remember being in school and getting my first pocket calculator, and what a world of difference that made to me. But you go back—in the very beginning of this book—all the way back to, you know, when humans started counting. So, when do we have any evidence of that first happening? And why is it believed that even back in the midst of time, we learned how to count using our fingers and other digits? Both very good questions. The oldest known mathematical artifact is the femur of a baboon.

2:14 So, a leg bone from a baboon. It’s about 42,000 years old, and it has a series of notches, kind of incised across it. And there are 29 of them, and it looks like they were inscribed or incised in four separate batches. And so, this is probably not decoration. This was intentional. This was being used to count something which numbered—or some group of things—which number 29. And that was found in a cave in South Africa, called the Lebombo bone and as I say, that is our oldest mathematical artifact. What I found quite interesting was that this, we would call it a tally stick. So, there’s a concept of using pieces of wood, other rods, bones, and so on, to count.

2:57 And these were used all the way down to about the 19th century. There was an interesting—perhaps interesting, I imagine it’s slightly more scary than interesting at the time—but the Houses of Parliament in Britain, so where the elected members of the British government sit almost burned to the ground in I think it’s about 1834. So, up until that point, the Treasury—the government department that managed money and debt and so on—still used tally sticks to track debts that it was owed. And they were phased out in 1826, and then some janitors in Houses of Parliament were tasked with getting rid of them. So, they stoked up the boilers underneath the Houses of Parliament, they started burning tally sticks, and it all caught fire.

3:39 Almost turned the whole place to the ground. Oh, my gosh. Did any tally sticks survive? Are there other tally sticks in the British Museum or other places that—they would be interesting to see—from that? Oh absolutely, yeah. It was quite a big event. You know, there are etchings, commemorative etchings, were made of the time it almost burned down because of tally sticks. Oh, my gosh [laugh] . But yeah, they’re fascinating things. It’s really, I guess, at that point, they were slightly more specialized. The Lebombo bone was just a bone, just for counting some particular quantity. The tally sticks that were used, that were stored in the basement of the Houses of Parliament were sticks, wooden sticks that were split. And so, you could etch a number of notches across them, and then you could snap off one of those pieces, and now the person, both the debtor and the debtee have—or the creditor and the creditee—have got a copy of what is owed.

4:28 And you can then trade these debts as if they’re money. They’re effectively paper money, in some sense. Almost like carbon copy. It sounds like that’s interesting. Mmm. Yeah, yeah. So, you move from that and a bit further in time, you talk about something I think a lot of us have seen at least in grade school, the abacus, and then and something related called a counting board, which I had not heard of before reading your book. So, can you tell us a bit about why those inventions were so fundamentally important in advancing our ability to calculate numbers? Another good question. Well, you mentioned last time, how do we know that we started to count? Where is the evidence for how we learn to count? And you mentioned we use our fingers and other anatomical—actually, there’s one particular group of people in Papua New Guinea who could count up to 33 using things like nipples and genitals as well.

5:17 So, once they ran out of fingers, they just kept on going. So— I think we all do that, Keith. I think we all do [laugh] — [laugh] . Indeed, indeed. Well, I’m sure we all have personal accounting systems. [laugh] . Right. So, I think the point is, if you’re using your hands, then you can only do—or other parts of your body—you’re limited to a single number at a time. Your body that is useful for other things, for things other than counting, is now tied up in recording those numbers. And so, an abacus—or a counting board, which is effectively an abacus, just on a flat surface, perhaps with some columns in it, and used pebbles or some other tokens to record, these are the ones, these are the tens, these are the hundreds, these are the thousands, and so on, so it just functions like an abacus—this gets the number out of your head.

6:02 So, it has the same, I think, it has the same utility that writing has. Writing gets things out of your head and allows you to record things either temporarily or more permanently. And of course, calculation, as you’re working through some large calculation, it’s useful to have that temporary storage mechanism, as any computer scientist will tell you. That’s what registers are in a computer, just there to hold things that you don’t need right now. Yeah, makes sense. And you continue that kind of evolution. You talk about John Napier, again, someone I didn’t know anything about until I read your book. Can you tell us about Mr. Napier and his creation, the logarithm, why that was so fundamentally important? I loved learning about John Napier.

6:43 I guess I knew of him. He was born in the 16th century. He was a Scottish—well, he was a landowner, sort of a member of the landed gentry. He was an astronomer and an alchemist, as most scientists were at that point. It wasn’t really a distinction between being an alchemist, and being just your common or garden scientist. He needed, as did many scientists, astronomers, astrologers, in fact—because again, there is little distinction between the two at that point—he needed a way to do fairly complicated mathematical problems that involved things like trigonometry, and also multiplication. And so, he discovered some—this innovation, this one particular equation that allowed you to multiply two sines together by doing a lookup.

7:28 Effectively, someone calculated the results in one particular way, laid them out in a book, and so if you needed to add sinX to sinY, or multiply sinX to sinY, you could look it up in this book. And he thought this was great. And he thought, I wonder if I can improve on this. So, he did. So, he came with his own version of it. Actually, sorry, that’s a lie. The algorithm that existed before him was slightly more complicated than just adding two looked up numbers. He managed to simplify it to this look up to, you know, sinX plus sinY, or thereabouts. And his version was specialized to astronomy. It was all about angles. But a friend of his, a guy called Henry Briggs, then generalized it to just base-ten numbers. So what, effectively, logarithms allow you to do is they allow you to multiply pretty much any two numbers together, purely by doing a lookup in a table and then adding two numbers together.

8:17 And this is just incredible. Like, multiplication is complicated, and it takes, you know, it takes a long time. It’s painful to do by hand. Logarithms just blew all of that away. It made it possible to carry out much larger, much more complicated equations, much more simply. But that wasn’t as far as it went. The thing that happened next, you know, this is birth of the modern era, I suppose, lots of things are happening, lots of people are talking to one another. So, you have Napier talking to Henry Briggs, who comes up with this base-ten generalization of logarithms. And then another guy comes along called Edmund Gunter and invents the Gunter scale. And this is like a ruler, except instead of measuring distances, it has a logarithmic scale on it.

8:59 So, if you imagine a normal ruler for measuring distance, the distances between any two adjacent numbers is the same. So, the distance between one and two is the same as the distance between two and three, and three and four and so on, whether it’s centimeters or inches or yards. The Gunter scale, the numbers get closer and closer together. So, they start off quite far apart. One and two are quite far apart, two and three are a bit closer, three and four are closer still. And this is because they were laid out according to Napier’s logarithmic scales. And then someone else, another guy called William Oughtred came along and realized that if you’ve laid two Gunter scales together, you could do multiplication without the lookup tables. You didn’t need them at all. So, now you’ve got a physical device that allows you to multiply effectively any two numbers to as much precision as the scale and your eyesight allows.

9:46 And this, in some ways, was the first mechanical calculator. Like, I did find it hard to define what is a calculator, and so I think for me, the simplest thing—I guess one of the simplest definitions I came across was, some external device not within the human brain, that can add, subtract, multiply, divide. Now, humans can add and subtract relatively easily. Multiplication and division is where it gets harder. The slide rule cracks that nut and allows us to do those things. So, to me, the slide rule is effectively the first mathematical calculator. You mentioned going to school and seeing your first pocket calculator. I think for me, I started doing fairly serious maths at school a few years after scientific calculators have come on the scene.

10:33 So, for me, seeing a slide rule was almost as much of a revelation [laugh] going in the opposite direction. Just, I was amazed. It’s like a magic stick. Right [laugh] . There’s such genius embedded in this little device. Yeah. I had that kind of same experience that my grandfather’s slide rule was in our desk at home, and I remember looking—it was a very mysterious thing, but I thought it was really almost an object of art in a way it looks, it just, it fascinated me. I frankly, never learned how to use a slide rule, but I love the look. So, I feel shamed into that, now, Keith. I need to go back and take a look at those. But I think truly both very useful and I think very, very beautiful devices.

11:13 What about this calculating machine? You talk about the Curta. Why did it stand out in, kind of, your story of the evolution of the calculator? The Curta is a really interesting calculator, and it’s almost the junction between mechanical calculators and electronic calculators. So, what happened was, slide rulers had existed for a few hundred years, well, a couple of hundred years. And in around about the 17th century, this new interest in mathematics came together with a new interest in, I guess, philosophy, but also clockwork, oddly. This was when, especially in Europe, and especially among the rich, clocks, and fairly shortly after that, watches were the luxury item to have.

11:58 So, you had a real, especially in Germany, you had a really burgeoning class of people who were very good at making small mechanical devices. So, you know, watches, clocks are the obvious examples. But museums are full of these trinkets that rich people bought that had some sort of clockwork mechanism inside them. The British Museum has got a stag inside it that you can wind up and send it rolling along the dinner table to a companion, and it has a little compartment in it for some wine, so when it reaches someone, they have to pick it up and drink the wine. That was typical. And then René Descartes, the French philosopher, thought of people and our minds as machines. There was just this general kind of—I guess it’s the birth of the notion of computing as some sort of mechanical operation.

12:43 And so, all of this came together. And there were, I think, two or three different people in France, Germany, and the UK, who all roughly had an idea that perhaps we can carry a calculation in some mechanical way. Not quite at the same time, but perhaps the most important one was Pascal, a French philosopher and mathematician, and I guess, a quite significant writer on Christian themes as well. He managed to build something that wouldn’t have been recognized as a mechanical calculator for at least a good couple of hundred years. So, it’s about the size of a typewriter or a shoebox, and had a number of dials along the front, and as you turned the dial, it would add a number to a little accumulator.

13:24 So, it had a set of little windows along the top, and as you turned these dials in the bottom, it just added up, you know, the accumulators accepted the number from the bottom. And they would carry, so you know, as you go from nine to zero on one of the dials, it would carry the one to the next dial along. The carry mechanism on his machine was too fragile. It didn’t work very well, but someone else did manage to perfect—this was another French, actually an accountant, a sort of—I think again, he was effectively, what an [insurance] pioneer, and he had been a quartermaster for the French army, for Napoleon’s army, a guy called Charles Xavier Thomas, and he perfected the carry mechanism, fundamentally.

14:06 And so, he devised this mathematical calculating device called an Arithmometer. And this was it. This was the first genuinely practical, and to some extent, mass produced, mathematical calculator. It could add and subtract quite well, and it could have—so multiplied by, you could multiply by tens, very easily as well. At the heart of Thomas’ machine, the Arithmometer, was a component called the stepped drum. And it’s not easy to explain what a stepped drum is, but it’s almost worth it because it helps explain how the Curta works and how it is an improvement. So, the stepped drum was a drum, and it had around it a number of splines.

14:46 It had nine splines, and they all start at the bottom. And as you move up the drum, the first one stops very short, then the second one stops a bit less short—or a bit longer—then the third one’s a bit longer still, and so on. And so, by the time we reach the top of the drum, by the time we reach spline number nine, it’s the full length of the drum. And what this means is, you could slide the drum forward or backwards in order to—so when you then crank the drum over one time, that tells you how many times an associated cog will be turned. So, if it’s slid all the way up, the associated cog moves by one tooth, or if you slide it all the way down, for example, then all nine splines engage it, and you add nine onto your accumulator.

15:28 This was the principle behind the Arithmometer. Thomas’ Arithmometer had one drum per digit, and that made it quite bulky. The Curta had a single drum in the middle, and it had a number of sliders arranged around the outside, and this meant that it was about the size of a Coke can, let’s say. It was a genuinely pocketable mechanical calculator. It was designed by a mechanical inventor called Curt Herzstark. He was born, I think, in Vienna in the early part of the 20th century, and he was the son of a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother. And this was extremely bad news for him. He ended up being sent to Buchenwald, which is effectively the most notorious of all of the concentration camps that the Nazis ran in the Second World War.

16:16 And he only survived because he was recognized by one of his jailers, who knew that he was mechanically very adept. And he was interviewed by the camp commandant, effectively, who said, “If you work for us, if you continue to work on this mechanical calculator you’ve been developing, perhaps things will turn out okay for you.” In the end, the war ended before anything much happened on that front, but by that point, he’d completed enough of his designs, and he had survived, that meant that he was able to put it into production. No European governments were interested, except for one called Liechtenstein. Your listeners may or may not have heard of Liechtenstein, but it’s a tiny, little Alpine state, and it’s a principality.

16:56 The Prince of Liechtenstein was interested and invested in Curt’s device. He called it the Curta, meaning effectively ‘Curt’s Daughter.’ And as I said, it went on to become the first really effective, pocketable, mechanical calculator, and ironically, pretty much the last of its kind because at that point, semiconductors—or not even semiconductors, but electronics were becoming much more prominent. The Second World War, of course, many different countries had been looking into electronics for one reason or another, and computing, digital computing, was then on the rise. So, the Curt—this marvelous mechanical device that really was never replicated again, they go for quite high prices at auction. I’d love to try one. I’ve played with simulations of one, but I’ve never seen one in the flesh—or in the metal—I’m afraid.

17:40 When I read this in your book, I thought, this is a movie waiting to be made. I mean, what an amazing story that is. The Curta is relatively well known, and the story behind it is relatively well known, but only in certain circles, and so yeah, if you know about it, you know everything about it, and if you don’t, you know nothing about it, is the way that I feel about it. You go on from that, you talk about Texas Instruments. I lived in Dallas, Texas for a while, and that was a big place there, still. And the Pocketronic, you talk about, produced by Texas Instruments and Canon. Why was that such a groundbreaking calculator, the Pocketronic? So, I mentioned how electronics—I have the same problem that I imagine lots of people have, which is, when we think electronics, we think silicon chips, but the two things are distinct.

18:28 So, electronic computers had come of age during the Second World War, really, but they were still made of fairly clunky components. So, if the main or the most important component in an electronic computer is a switch. Then up until the ’50s, that would have been a valve, or a vacuum tube. So, in the UK, they’re typically called valves; in the US are typically called vacuum tubes. And this is a light bulb with an extra set of wires in it, more or less. That’s simplifying it slightly, but it can act as an amplifier or as a switch. It harks all the way back to a discovery by Thomas Edison, who had something incredible in his hands and he didn’t realize it. I mean, he did well for himself. He did [laugh] . —I believe, but he did not go on to invent the computer.

19:12 So, computers had been these massive, bulky, room-filling devices, comprised largely of vacuum tubes, which are prone to fusing, sort of blowing out just like normal incandescent light bulbs. And then along came the transistor. And the transistor was a similar amplifier or switch, but made on a single, tiny piece of a semiconductor material like germanium or silicon. TI—Texas Instruments—were fortunate enough to have hired a semiconductor engineer called Jack Kilby, who went on to figure out that, well, if we can make individual electronic components out of individual pieces of germanium or silicon, what if we just put them all on a single piece? And so, he effectively invented the microchip.

19:53 He worked out that you can put multiple different components on a single silicon chip. And this then, this shrinks—a room-filling computer down to something tiny. The main application at that point had been for the US military. So, for example, all of the Minuteman missiles, which are scattered across the Midwest, had Texas Instrument chips in them so they could be guided towards their targets. But once you have enough nuclear missiles, you don’t need any more microchips, which is a simple way of saying that TI needed a new market. Now, what they’d done once before with transistors is they had designed a transistor radio, and they found a consumer electronics company in the US to manufacture it, I think, was called Regency.

20:34 And so, they’d done very well. They managed to sell lots more transistors because they stimulated this market, they stimulated the market for transistors by selling a device to use them, and they wanted to do the same thing with microchips. They needed a civilian market for microchips. And so, Pat Haggerty, the TI boss, and Jack Kilby had been on a plane one day, and the story is that they took off, they started discussing what they could do. By the time they landed, they had decided they were going to build a pocketable calculator, which would have been unthought-of at that point. The closest that had happened up to that point, I think, was—well, there were desktop calculators that use microchips, but TI were good at microchips. They wanted to demonstrate how good they were, and so they designed the microchips.

21:15 They figured out that a display that is visible to the user, that lights up, a digital display would be too expensive, and so they came up with a very clever solid state printer instead, which meant that the calculator was only consuming energy as it was actually calculating. It didn’t have to light up the display the whole time. But they didn’t want to build it. They designed this thing, they you know, they designed the insides and the outsides, the user interface. They ended up partnering with Canon, who at that time were a—well, they still are—Japanese electronics manufacturer. They started out making cameras. They got into making electronics because they needed to make better lenses. They needed to measure things and engineer them better. And they were just part of this big swell of companies in Japan. I suppose it was the first big offshoring boom for this sort of thing that were just taking lots of business from the US.

22:01 The US would typically make the very difficult stuff like microchips, and then ship them over to Japan to have them assembled into machines because labor was cheaper over there for the slightly lower tech stuff. Canon was their chosen partner, and so that was all great. And then TI took just a bit long to actually bring these chips into production. They had lots of problems with yield. They couldn’t make enough of these chips, and so by the time the Pocketronic is—which is what Canon called it—came on the market. It looked old-fashioned. It was only a few years old, but already looked obsolete because there were other, frankly better pocket calculators at that point already. So, it’s a real shame. They were very definitely the pioneers, but they did not build the first pocketable electronic calculator.

22:42 And that really goes to the firm—what’s it—Busicom HANDY-LE. So that’s, if I recall correctly, the first one. It is. It is indeed. Busicom is, I think it’s a contraction of ‘business’ and ‘computer’— Got it. There you go. —so [unintelligible] it’s Busicom. And this is a fascinating story, really. They were a relatively small company that made electronic calculators in Japan. I think they’d made mechanical calculators, and moved on to electronic ones. And at this point, which is, I think, the early-’70s, some American chip manufacturers were making chips that were basically an entire calculator on a chip. It’s everything, apart from the display, the keyboard, and the batteries.

23:24 So, all of the logic that was required to do the calculation, to have a memory function, to drive the display was embedded in a single chip. And so, Busicom thought, great, we are going to build a pocket calculator with one of these single chips. And they did. That was the HANDY-LE. It was about the size of a packet of cigarettes or thereabouts. It was fabulously expensive at the time. But, yeah, that was pretty much the earliest pocket calculator. But Busicom are maybe better known for, ironically, a less well known calculator. They had this idea of building a family of chips. So, not just here’s a calculator on a chip, but let’s think, okay, we’ll have an arithmetic chip, and we’ll have one for driving printers, and we’ll have one for driving visible displays, we’ll have one for interfacing with different machines.

24:12 So, they thought, we can build a cash register with this, with this family of chips, or an ATM, or, indeed, a calculator. They couldn’t make the chips themselves. They could design all the logic circuits, but they didn’t have the expertise to actually manufacture the chips. They were put in touch with a little startup in the US called Intel— Oh, yes [laugh] . —who were making memory chips at that time. And they went to Intel, they said, we’d like you to make these chips for us. And Intel said, we will take your business. Unfortunately, we do not have enough people to do this for you. And so, they proposed a different model. I think Busicom had [wanted] , I think it was more than ten chips in this family, this chip set. Intel thought we can do it with four. We can do it with a memory chip to store working information; a ROM which is a read-only memory, so it provides instructions; shift register, which is basically for input-output; and crucially, with a single chip to pull it all together.

25:04 They called it a Central Processing Unit. This was the Intel 4004, basically the first widely available microcomputer CPU. And Intel did all of this so that Busicom could make a very boring, a very beige, desktop calculator with a printer built into it. All computing, the devices we’re talking on now, our phones, everything, really, in some way, owes its existence this one exceptionally boring calculator. And as I said, I think no one knows about this. The HANDY-LE is somewhat known because it’s the first pocket calculator. But, yeah, but Busicom, kind of, has since disappeared. Intel’s not looking too hot these days, but the legacy of all this very much still lives on. So, tell me, what timeframe are we talking?

25:46 When was this happening with the HANDY-LE? The HANDY-LE was, if I remember the 1970s. 1971. 1971. You’re reminding me, I always have pop culture references—Matt will tell you that—a couple years ago, I was watching an old American detective series called Banacek with the great George Peppard in the lead role, and one of the episodes focused on the disappearance of a computer. And the computer took up the whole room, so the line in that was, “No one just walks away with a computer.” I love that [laugh] . [laugh] . And not to spoil it, was all done with mirrors, so the computer was still there, by the way, but it showed you how quickly time and technology had changed, for sure [laugh] . Another company that got into the mix that you talk about in Empire of the Sum is Hewlett Packard.

26:37 They had a calculator called the HP-35 that was pretty revolutionary. Why was that so important? The HP-35, in some ways, doesn’t look revolutionary if you know that, for example, the Busicom HANDY-LE exists. You know it’s 1971. Why, it’s the first electronic pocket calculator. Then the HP-35 is perhaps not super exciting. But what it was still—it was a pocketable calculator. It was quite well designed. A fair amount of thought went into the enclosure, how the buttons were arranged, and so on. And it had 35 buttons, hence the name. But this was a scientific calculator. This was something that could do proper—or you could solve proper engineering-grade problems with, whereas previously, a calculator that could do that sort of thing would take up your desk.

27:23 This was revolutionary. This was Moore’s law in action. The chips were tinier, the complexity was much higher. And I think what the HP-35 did well was it took all of the smarts that HP had, all of the algorithms they developed to do very complicated engineering problems, and figured out how to embed them on these chips. So, it wasn’t as clever as Busicom’s desktop calculator; it wasn’t as clever as Intel’s chip set; it was just a very finely honed application of the special purpose chip, I guess, that had gone—you know, we’re going to build a single chip for calculator. It just pushed that to its limits. And there was something about it, in some ways, as I said, the HP-35 does not initially appear super interesting, but something about it caught the imagination.

28:08 Engineering students would sell their cars so they could buy HP-35s. NASA scientists would buy them, and then they’d be stolen. So, there was a short-lived fad for lockable calculator boxes so that you could store your calculator safely. There were some maths instructors in the US Army that created a course solely so they could give themselves an excuse to buy some HP-35s. This was like an iPhone. It had that same sort of consumer electronics, or made a splash in a similar way. And in fact, not having been shopping for consumer electronics in 1972, I’m not sure how true this is, but I’ve seen it said that the HP-35 created the concept of a must-have device: what’s the next big thing? It was the first big thing, the first thing that took people into the shops to buy this one thing that they must have, whether they needed it or not.

28:54 So, it had a huge, it had an outsized impact, I think. Have you used an HP-35? I’ve seen one. I’ve never used one before, unfortunately. I keep one trolling eBay, looking for them, but unfortunately not. [laugh] . Now, the next calculator I want to talk about, though I’m pretty sure I have used, the TI’s 81 that really was in classrooms around the world. Can you tell us a bit about the TI-81? Yes. TI, of course, they started making calculators, or designing calculators back in the late-’60s with the Pocketronic. They eventually realized they didn’t want to outsource things, so they built a, kind of, vertically integrated ability to make—they started off making components. So, they already made chips, then they started making keyboards and displays, and finally, they started making the enclosures themselves, so they could build a calculator from scratch.

29:40 Calculators in… I think, particularly in the education in the US, started to get a lot of attention. There were a couple of teachers at Ohio State University that started to use calculators in one of their remedial maths classes, and they thought this is going to be useful for two reasons. One is, students who are having trouble with maths may be attracted by the shiny new gadgets. I guess, maybe the HP-35 was rubbing off a bit. If it’s easier for them to do simpler problems, they can concentrate on the more abstract concepts: ‘What are we trying to model here,’ not ‘How do I multiply these two large numbers together? How do I compute a square root?’ If you can forget those things, you can start to think about what’s the underlying process or equation that we’re trying to model here?

30:24 And it seemed to work. So, calculators started to gather pace. And TI actually looked at Casio in Japan. Casio had released a graphing calculator, which I suspect at the time, must have been as exciting as the HP-35. Here’s a calculator that can not only tell you the result of some calculation, but graph it. They can graph whatever you like, or 2D function you like. And so, TI basically cloned the Casio x-7000G. They used the same chip, I think, a chip called the Z80, which ended up being in many, many different computing devices. It had the same sort of functions, it was the same size, the same broad shape.

31:06 It became very successful. It became the graphing calculator that anyone in the US who had to do any kind of advanced mathematics would get used to. You know, you’ve mentioned it. My wife is American; she talked about using one of the successors, I think, the TI-83 or 84. And so, there has been a long line of these, just gradually enhanced TI calculators. You can still buy a Texas Instruments graphing calculator that runs on a Z80 chip now, which just, the mind boggles. It’s so commoditized now and this chip was so well designed, incidentally, by one of the designers of the Intel 4004, I think it’s actually binary-compatible with the 8008. But yeah, so the TI-81 spawned this huge dynasty of graphing calculators.

31:49 And then TI, I don’t know it’s a horrible thing to say, but I think they got a bit greedy. They didn’t want to lose the market that—you know, so basically, Casio and TI kind of shared the market for these graphing calculators, and TI got into lobbying. They started to push for Texas Instruments calculators to be the ones on the list of allowed devices for exams, the ones that are recommended to students. They made deals with textbook publishers, such that when you read through your maths textbook and it says, “This is how you graph this on your calculator,” it would be, “This is how you graph this on your TI-81 calculator.” So, the pictures in there are pictures of the TI-81, the keys in there are the keys of the TI-81. And it reached a head when they tried to lobby the Texas state government to make a particular algebra course mandatory in high school, which I’m sure would not have gone down well with generations of high school students.

32:37 I think that failed, but you know, there are again, there are anecdotes of teachers saying that they have to provide TI-81 to their students, they get stolen, and they have to visit pawn shops to buy them back again because [laugh] the students with light fingers have decided to steal them, and sell them on to make a bit of money. So yeah, the TI-81 in itself, again, in some ways, is not super interesting. It was more or less a clone of existing calculator, but how sticky it became inside the US education system was quite striking. Yeah, it was everywhere. And Casio, though, stayed in that market. They continued and competed pretty well with TI, right? They did indeed, and especially over in Europe. If TI is the default in the States, from my memory, it was very much Casio.

33:22 All of the calculators were Casio. I didn’t go into it. My publisher, W. W. Norton, is American. As I said, my wife is American. I think I end up looking at things through a kind of an Atlantic lens, and a sort of transatlantic lens in some sense. But I’m sure if I looked into it, perhaps would find Casio also may have done exactly the same sort of thing, I guess. Once you’re in a certain market, you don’t want to let go of it. That’s right [laugh] . That’s very true. Very true. And you do mention in your book something I ran into and remember as a kid, is that when calculators—and I’m sufficiently old to say this—when they really first started being on the scene in schools, at least in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, where I grew up, you weren’t allowed to use them at first.

34:03 And then later, they became more and more integrated into, it’s okay to use them. But there was that gray area, and then it was okay, but at first it was like cheating, you know, if you used a calculator in math class. So, how did they respond here, perhaps in Europe as well, to that use in the classroom setting? That’s a really interesting one. I think the answer is that most teachers initially freaked out. Almost every new information technology seems to come with a built-in moral panic. The story of hieroglyphics, or the myth behind hieroglyphics, is that it was handed down to mankind by the God Thoth, and the mythical Egyptian king who received it turned around and said, well, thanks, but now we’re just going to forget stuff.

34:46 So, [laugh] right from the very beginning, the very earliest information technology, it was seen as a bad thing. There was a kind of a debate for a long time between pen-and-paper mathematicians and abacists, people who used abacuses. Again, there was, you know, pen-and-paper was seen in some way as inferior to the abacus, which was the incumbent device at that point. Then mobile phones came along, you know, television, now AI. So, every significant information technology makes us question it and ourselves, you know, over and over again. And calculators were the same. It was the same worry. If you learn how to add, and subtract, and multiply, and divide using a calculator, what if you can’t ever do it in your head or on a piece of paper?

35:29 And honestly, that’s correct. But we are now freed in the same way that the remedial students of OSU were freed. We’re now freed to think about the higher-level stuff. You know, we can sit back and think more clearly about the larger-scale problems. So, I think the thing happened that teachers were worried about, and it also doesn’t matter. Like, we have tools, we’re humans. We’re nothing, if not beings—what separates us from other animals? Tools. Writing, right? All of these things make us human. So, I don’t think we should feel too bad if we can’t multiply or divide large numbers in our heads anymore. Well, I feel much better about myself, then. That was always my worst field, Keith, my worst, so calculators were a revelation for me.

36:13 Well, I so enjoyed Empire of the Sum. I enjoy all your work. What’s next for you? It is a book called Face With Tears of Joy, which is about emoji. So, it’s almost a sequel to my first book Shady Characters, which was about unusual marks of punctuation. I started just sort of writing about emoji in a similar way a few years ago. And yeah, I just felt like it was right for being turned into a book. Emoji went through quite a lot of turmoil in the last few years. I was going to say, actually, I would recommend that you buy the book. There’s a lot in there about governance bodies. If you enjoy tales of committee meetings, then this thing will just—this will knock your socks off.

36:55 But there was a lot of concern about how emoji is managed. It’s just such an interesting subject. Emoji are not a language, but they display the characteristics of a language. They’re quite democratic in some senses, and also they’re not democratic at all in others. And they’re everywhere. [About] the calculators, at least with calculators, we somewhat—hmm, actually, no, the same thing is true of emoji. Some people are worried about, like, what are the morals of using a calculator? People worry about one of the morals of using an emoji. You know, there are books on etiquette that tell you when you can and can’t use emoji. So, they’re just another information technology, and they raise the same questions, they ask the same things of us as all of these other information technologies did.

37:37 I’m giving a big smiley face to that idea. I’m looking forward to it, Keith. And again, thank you so much for joining us in AMSEcast. Really great conversation. Not at all. Thank you, again, for having me. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I invite you to visit the American Museum of Science and Energy and the K-25 History Center in person. You can also shop at our online store and become a member at AMSE.org.

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