Long before the hand-held calculators, there was the millionaire calculator machine—a large, clunky, and expensive mechanical machine that performed direct multiplications with only a single turn of a crank.
Created in 1893 by Swiss engineer Otto Steiger and patented and marketed by Zurich’s Hans Egli company in 1895, the Millionaire Calculator Machine was the first commercially successful mechanical calculator that could perform a direct multiplication.
– The Millionaire Machine used a mechanical representation of the multiplication table to form partial products, in the same way that a human “calculator” uses a multiplication table committed to memory.
– Although excelling in multiplication and division calculations, the Millionaire’s slider setting mechanism was too slow to be useful in adding long columns of figures.
In 1892 the brilliant Swiss engineer Otto Steiger from St. Gallen (1858-1923), who lived in Munich, received his first patent for a calculating machine of direct multiplication type.