INVENTION: Calculator’s Calculations

Anyone who is baffled by mathematics beyond the multiplication tables can imagine with awe the Brobdingnagian mental efforts involved in inventing a clerkproof, 5,500-part machine that adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides with the flick of a finger. Last week a 52-year-old Swedish inventor named Carl M. Fridé celebrated the tenth anniversary of the second time he had invented such a machine. Moreover, although the principle of an accurate calculator is already 123 years old, Carl Fridén’s second model was further complicated by the fact that he could not infringe on the still-valid patents on his first one.*

Going Forward. All this started in August 1914 when young Carl, a mechanical engineer for the Swedish Match Trust, arrived in Sydney, Australia to build a match factory on the very day that Germany and Great Britain went to war.

Both Sweden and the Match Trust were suspect to the British, so Fridén, stuck with no funds or friends, got a job in a Sydney machine shop, and used his spare time to work on a model calculator (in Sweden he had apprenticed in a laboratory that had done pioneer work on the problem). Two years later he and his wife got permission to go home. They never got there—a fellow passenger on the boat to San Francisco, who worked for California’s Marchant Calculating Machine Co., persuaded Fridén to stop off in the U.S.

By late 1918 Fridén was a Marchant draftsman, with an eye for profits rare in a mathematician-inventor. When the U.S. Government made Marchant discontinue its current model because it violated some German patents, young Carl filled the void with his own model—for $100,000 plus $1 on every machine sold. The next Marchant crisis—a patent battle with Monroe Calculating Machine Co., the only direct Marchant competitor—ended up with peace and cross-licensing for the two companies; a neat $225,000 cash-and-consultant deal (plus stock) for Fridén.

Then the depression dumped Marchant and Fridén into deep red ink, finally dumped Fridén right out. He went back to shoestring calculating, determined to invent a competing machine and at the same time avoid any patent fights. In one year flat he had it: with the $27,000 the market crash had left him, plus $25,000 from four California backers, he started the Fridén Calculating Machine Co.

At first small, wiry Carl Fridén had to sell his machine for cash in advance — he hadn’t even a model to demonstrate. But by last week his big plant, built in a San Leandro cherry orchard, employed more than 1,300 workers and was the No. 1 U.S. producer of rotary calculators (as distinguished from the simpler key-driven types). And closemouthed Carl celebrated his wonder machine’s tenth anniversary by giving out the nearest thing yet to a financial statement for his closed corporation.

His four silent partners, he said, have taken out some $300,000 apiece in profits (a 4,800% return) since 1933. Even with out a calculator, that added up to a round $1,200,000 for Fridén’s own 50% share in the business—more than enough to stock his 600-acre Alameda County ranch with fine palomino horses and Hereford cattle, and to pay for the lavish swimming and riding parties he likes.

Going Backward. Until war came, Fridén kept his company debt-free. Now, with $20,000,000 in ordnance contracts—including a hush-hush Air Force job—he has had to take on some fixed charges.

Though his Air Force job requires such super-precision work that only two other U.S. firms have been trusted with a similar job, war has in one way caused Carl Fridén to take a backward step. Until the Army begged for hand-cranked calculators (to use in unelectrified outposts), all but a fraction of Fridén’s machines had run by electricity.

*The Babylonians and the Egyptians used crude calculators, like the abacus, centuries before Christ. But mechanical mathematical short cuts were held up all through the Middle Ages by the prevalence of Roman numerals: a barrier obvious to any contemporary citizen who has tried to multiply LXVI, say, by XCVII—even by long hand. The first really successful modern calculator came from an Alsatian inventor, Charles Xavier Thomas of Colmar in 1820. Its mathematical principle: multiplication is in essence addition, division is in essence subtraction. Its engineering principles, whereby any set of numbers can be set up, counted and recorded by an elaborate series of pointers, slots, knobs and toothed gears, are fifth-dimensional to the layman— not to mention higher mathematical calculators which even solve equations (TIME, Jan. 12, 1938).