The Millionaire (calculator)
first commercially successful mechanical calculator that could perform a direct multiplication
The Millionaire was the first commercially successful mechanical calculator that could perform a direct multiplication. It was in production from 1893 to 1935 with a total of about five thousand machines manufactured.
It was commercialized as "The Millionaire" in English speaking countries, "La Millionnaire" in French and "Millionär" in German speaking countries.
History
The principle of a calculation machine with progressive transmission of tens was invented by Chebyshev and demonstrated at the 1878 World's fair in Paris. In 1881 Chebyshev demonstrated a model of the calculation machine with automatic multiplication but did not take out a patent for it.
In 1834 Luigi Torchi of Milan invented a direct multiplication machine. The first patented multiplying machines was due to Edmund Barbour (1872), Ramón Verea (1878) and Léon Bollée (1889). The Bollée machine could be considered the direct ancestor of the Millionaire.
Designed by Otto Steiger, a Swiss engineer, the moving carriage of the Millionaire has a 20 decimal digit accumulator that shows the product after multiplication and into which dividend is entered prior to division. The 10-digit multiplicand or divisor is entered on the sliders
(or keyboard, on later models) above the carriage, while successive digits of the multiplier or quotient are entered with a push-button lever on the upper left.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Millionaire (calculator)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.