Vintage Mechanical Calculators

These things are those items you look back at, and realise how really cool they were, and how spoilt we are now with the equipment we have.

I’ll stick with the one’s created by a specific company called ‘PRODUX’.

It was designed by Otto Meuter (1892-1970) who was originally a designer in the Addiator factory but left to start his own businesses.

In 1928 he founded Werkstatt Otto Meuter in Berlin and produced the first Produx machines. 

The generic name for any of these Calculators was the Addiator.

The design went pretty much unchanged for the lifetime of these amazing little machines.

The sliders protrude through the bottom of the device, so resetting to zero is a simple pushing back – set it on the desk and push down.

These take a bit of getting used to, but then work surprisingly well .

Due to the high cost of the early electronic calculators, many mechanical calculators were produced into the early 1970s.

They were ousted when cheap LSI (Large-Scale Integration) electronics became available.

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We are a small team of history enthusiasts who feel the history of things is important, and should be passed on as much as possible.

This blog will usually have an accompanying item for sale in the SHOP, but some will just be about curios, antiques, items and dates that fascinate me.