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· 12 Jan 2022

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Who invented calculator

Ever since the world has been formed humans have been doing inventions to save time and energy, the calculator is one of them. It’s a simple small device that makes our calculations easy. But do you know how was it made? If no then let's quickly dive into the details.
Pascaline or Arithmetic Machine, the first calculator was only able to do addition and subtraction. French mathematician-philosopher Blaise Pascal designed it between 1642 and 1644. Although when it comes to the invention of the calculator, there is a list of scientists and their inventions, contributions and discoveries, hand-held electronic pocket-sized calculators seem the closest among those models that we see even today.

The first electronic calculator
Pat Haggerty, the president of Texas Instruments (TI), spearheaded the development of the first hand-held electronic calculator in 1965. One of TI's engineers, Jack Kilby, invented the integrated circuit while working for Haggerty, and TI went on to become the first company to mass-produce microchips with integrated circuits. The market for chips, however, was confined at the time to the military's Minute Man missiles and industrial markets. The chip was a source of concern for even computer manufacturers.

The company's difficulty in selling the chips was exacerbated by its lack of consumer market knowledge and the fact that the chips did not wear out. It took several efforts to manufacture a "good" chip, but once it was, it usually stayed that way. TI needed to identify new products that employed the chip if they wanted to create and sell more chips. To bring the integrated circuit into everyday life, a dramatic invention was required. Kilby first gathered a group of TI engineers. He told them he had been on a plane with Pat Haggerty, who thought that with the way electronics were progressing, we could have our own personal computer, which would be portable and replace the slide rule. Haggerty's ideas were occasionally "off the wall," according to Merryman, but they were taken seriously since they often paid off. Kilby informed the engineers that the personal computer should be the size of a book he had on his desk, have some buttons or other forms of input, neon lights or other forms of output, and be powered by batteries. The group explored developing a slide rule computer without using the name "calculator." Van Tassel was principally responsible for the keyboard, Kilby for the power source, and Merryman for the logic and output. The project was code-named CAL-TECH because the team was referring to the device as a calculator rather than a computer at this point.

From CAL-TECH to Pocketronic
CAL-TECH was ready to use in 1966. It could only add and subtract, however. Multiplication was accomplished through repeated addition, whereas division was accomplished through repeated subtraction. It was a "four-hanger" or "plain-vanilla," as they're known in the industry, and it wowed Pat Haggerty! He enlisted the help of TI's lawyers, who took longer to obtain the patent than the CAL-TECH team did to develop the calculator. The patent was originally filed on September 29, 1967, then refiled on May 13, 1971, and finally refilled on December 21, 1972. Later, TI merged with another firm that produced the CAL-TECH's commercial version. On April 11, 1970, it was a significantly lighter calculator named the Pocketronic. The Pocketronic's case was plastic rather than metal, but the insides of both the Pocketronic and the CAL-TECH were nearly identical. This device gradually gained popularity among the general people.

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