Addiators are a Cool Bargain - Don't Buy a Curta

Have you ever thought, "Gee, I would really like a Curta calculator." And then looked at them on eBay and wept at the obscene prices that the overpaid software engineers at the slop factories have jacked them up to. There is just no reason for Aerta to sell for $1,000. There's nothing revolutionary about them other than the thing that literally revolves inside. They were not the first pocket calculator and they were not the fastest mechanical calculator. Now, if you really do want a pocket mechanical calculator, an Adafix Adiator is probably the best option to go for. And I'm particularly excited to finally have an original Arithma example here. So, I thought I would show this off today and kind of explain why you're better off getting one of these than a Curta. Now, I think interestingly here, the example I have was uh either fully complete or some kind of display example because I have all of the accessories here and then it has this interesting little card that I think would be put on a counter near a register to entice buyers to pick one up. It's just really cool to see. I don't know what else this would be for other than that. But the Arithma Adiator is based on the slide calculator design by Lucron and is absolutely fantastic. Now, this particular Adiator is a slightly later revision and is an interesting US import as we'll see in a moment, but this is a stylus-driven mechanical slide calculator and they are super cool. And the main operating principle for an Adiator is the sliding metal bars that are inside of the calculator. Now, these can be moved to different positions to show different digits on the display. When you need to clear the calculator, there is a bar on the top that you pull on that moves all of the slides back up. This is the basic premise for how to use this machine. Now, if you want to enter a number, you need to decide how many significant digits you need either direction. Technically, this is where you enter the first integer digit and then these would be the decimal points. So, if you wanted to enter pi as 3.14, you would do it like that. I know what four is. But there's nothing stopping you from treating these as the decimal values as well. Now, basic operations on this are extremely easy. We can see that we have addition up here and we have a subtraction down here. Inputting a number at all is exactly the same thing as an addition operation. So if we wanted to input 52, we go to the five and the two and we pull those down. We can see that has added them to the register here. I'll take a moment to note that while this unit is overall in very good shape. We can see how much wear these slides have had because someone actually used this thing a ton. People say that the Curtis, you know, were highly reliable and used a lot. Well, so were these. We can see based on the wear on this zero versus this zero in the leading column. Yeah, this thing saw a lot of action. Now, with 52 entered here, we could add an additional number to this. Like, let's say we want to add 19. We could start up here and we can pull our nine down, but we'll quickly find that this jams before we get to the bottom. And we can see this up arrow right here. And when I release this, I was in the one position. And when we see that up arrow, that means that we need to take the slide all the way back up and then move it over into the carryover position there. This is added one to the next digit over so that we could add our full value of nine to both registers. Then if we were continuing to add our I think I said 19, we can just do that. I don't remember what the number was, but that's how you do a carryover. Now we do the same thing on the bottom if we want to do a subtraction. So let's say we want to subtract two here. Now we also need to go towards the center. But we can see that we get the red arrow there again as well. Now if I bring this back to displaying 71, there is a more efficient trick that we can use. When we put the stylus in here, if we see that it is surrounded by red, then we know that we're going to underflow or overflow when we move this operation to the center. So we can just skip straight to doing the carryover right there. And there we can see we have subtracted our number. Now we can do this with a much bigger value. So like let's say we want to subtract uh 37. So I would go here and subtract 7 and that fits. And then we could go here and subtract that and that fits as well. So those are the basic operations of an adiator. Now this is actually a slightly later revision of an adiator. An original Adiator would have had the subtraction on the backside and required flipping the unit like that. This is a far more efficient way of doing this. And I really like this version. But if you want to see what the other version looks like and see more complicated operations like division on one of these, I'll link my video on an adapix model down below. Now, I have an interesting side note about these Arithma Aiators, at least in the United States, because we can see that this says it was made in Germany. And this says it was imported from West Germany. And if we look at the directions that come with this, we can see not only are they in English, but they state down here, Harrison Home Products Group in New Jersey. Now, I think all of the arithmas that I've seen that were imported in the United States were actually done by this company. And I find this particularly interesting because they likely had to write or translate directions for American users from German. And these are actually made by this import company. Just a kind of interesting note because I mean the original would have been written in German. But that is an Arithma Adiator. And I personally think that these are a cooler and more interesting device than the Curta because these were designed and made 60 years before the Curta came out and are just so wonderfully simple. It's truly a great piece of engineering design. And again, if you really want a faster adding machine, you should just get a comptoometer because these things are just incredible. Well, that's it. If you enjoyed this quick look at an ariththma, you may want to subscribe. If you want to help support the channel, you can find me on Patreon. But for now, that's it, and I will see you next time.

If you want to see how division works on one of these, check out my other video on one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT8fSGHHiAs