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Early mechanical calculators - The Arithmomètre, Charles Xavier Thomas, 1872

The first calculating machine put in serial production was the Arithmomètre (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 companies Soleil (1829) and Aigle (1843).

Of course, others had tried before him to make calculating machines in quantities: let’s mention only PascalLeibnizBraun, 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

This video has the full explanation as to how to use each feature of the machine: https://tinyurl.com/yz8px9ay

 

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.

 

1. Courtesy of  Computer Timeline.com                                                                    

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