Early mechanical
calculators - The Arithmomètre, Charles Xavier Thomas, 1872
The first calculating machine put in serial production was theArithmomètre(arithmometer)
of the French entrepreneur Charles-Xavier Thomas de Colmar (1785-1870).
Colmar conceived the idea of the arithmometer during his lengthy stay
with the armies of Marchall Soult, where he needed to perform a lot of
calculations. This became even more important in his eyes when, in 1819, he
was appointed General Manager of the Phoenix insurance company and, later,
when he founded the insurance companiesSoleil(1829)
andAigle(1843).
Of course, others had tried before him to make
calculating machines in quantities: let’s mention only Pascal, Leibniz, Braun,
Morland,Hahn,
Sauter,
Schuster,
Müller,
Stanhope(especially
Hahn tried to manufacture in amount his machines but without success). But
these machines, often defective and very expensive, made it impossible to
commercialize. Moreover, it was too early to produce in large quantities a
calculator in the 17th or 18th century. Human
society did not yet need such devices and the technologies, needed for such
mass production, have not been invented yet. In the middle of the 19th century,
with the industrial revolution, technological obsicles dropped out. More and
more enterprises, scientific, military and government institutions became
eager to accept a calculator. In the nick of time, came Thomas de Colmar.
In fact, Thomas commenced the design of his
calculating machine in 1818, but it was first made public in 1820 when he
was granted a five-year patent (pat. No. 1420, 18 November 1820. Obviously, the calculating mechanism is based on the stepped
drum mechanism of Leibniz. It is clear however that the patent represents
only a transient prototype, on which Thomas was still actively working. By
1821, when he was ready to submit an example to the scrutiny of the Société
d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale, the design had already
moved on significantly.
In 1821 Thomas de Colmar submitted to the Sociėtė
d’Encouragement… in Paris the first copy of the calculating machine he
had constructed (which he called an arithmomètre), manufactured
by the Parisian horloger-mécanicien Jean-Pierre Devrine.
From 1822, when the production started, until 1878, were manufactured about
fifteen hundred machines, the last models cost 500 franks, a serious sum for this time.
Interestingly, in the book Histoire Des Nombres: Et de La Numeration
Mechanique (1855), the author, Jacomy-Régnier claimed that Thomas had
spent 300000 francs on developing the arithmometer, setting that figure
against Leibniz’s reputed costs of 100000 francs and Babbage’s notorious
government subvention of £17000 (reckoned as equivalent to 425000 francs).
Admittedly, at least until the end of the 1850s Thomas’s work on the
arithmometer is more likely to fall within the category of vanity publishing
than profit and mass production; but he was already independently wealthy
from his other business interests.
It took Thomas nearly thirty years from his
first patent model to when actual production could begin. The series
production started about 1851
and finished around 1914. The Thomas workshop completed five
hundred machines from 1821 to 1865, three hundred machines from 1865 to
1870, four hundred machines from 1871 to 1875, and three hundred machines
from 1876 to 1878, fifteen hundred in all from Thomas, 40% of the production was sold in France
and the remainder was intended for export. In fact, up to the time when the
calculating machine industry was introduced into Germany by Arthur Burkhardt
(1878), Thomas’ workshop was the only company in this line and supplied the
whole world with its products. Including Thomas's output, another 3500
variants of the arithmometer were
manufactured by many other firms that entered the market during the 90 years
that this model of calculator was made. Besides Germany, factories making
variants of the Thomas machine were also founded in other parts of Europe.
In England the insurance company Prudential supported the
development of the calculating machine Tate. Soon after 1900 the
Austrian stepped-drum machines Graber, Austria, and
Bunzel-Delton appeared. Mass production and universal availability had
arrived, if not exactly a cheap price. That would be left to the Grimme,
Nautalis & Co. with their
Brunsviga model introduced in 1892.
Thomas de Colmar died of acute bladder disease on 12
March 1870, at the age of 84, in one of his properties on 156 Boulevard
Haussmann in Paris, and was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. The Sun
King (as he was dubbed) left a huge fortune of over 24 million francs, not
to mention château de Maisons-Laffitte, château de Champfleury in
Carrières-sous-Poissy, château and domaine de Mairé in Vienne, etc. By his
death, the “Aigle – Soleil” group was the biggest insurance business in
France and he owned 81% of it.¹
Arithmomètre, 1872, serial number 1015 in ebony wood case with brass
inlay decoration and logo.
Brass inlays
Timeline of the Arithmomètre and its clones through 1895
Demonstration video of the four species function (addition,
subtraction, multiplication, division) of the Arithmomètre. This model was
the first commercially successful calculator to be made in a series
production. Fifteen hundred were produced between 1821 and 1874. During this
time many other companies began producing similar machines under license
from the company.