"I had an idea… I should look at everything backwards… I'll pretend I have already invented everything. What does this kind of machine have to look like, so someone could use it?” Curta calculator: The mechanical marvel born in a Nazi death camp:

The collection of manufacturing technologies developed by Hall, Blanchard, and, later, men like Thomas Warner and Cyrus Buckland at the Springfield Armory has been dubbed “Armory practice” by the historian David Hounshell, and was a key element in the American technologic gene pool. Merritt Roe Smith has traced the numerous skilled machinists who p

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hen I will begin in German. I was born in Vienna on the 26th of January in 1902, a child of the parent Samuel Jakob Herzstark and Marie Herzstark. The marriage was a civil marriage, because my father was born a Jew, and my mother was a true Christian. But they were both free spirits. My father left Judaism but he had no affiliation and remained wit... See more

We designated this first product the Model 200A because we thought the name would make us look like we’d been around for a while. We were afraid that if people knew we’d never actually developed, designed, and built a finished product, they’d be scared off. Our pricing was even more naive: We set it at $54.40 not because of any cost calculations bu

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