My 1957 Friden Mechanical Calculator goes on Japanese TV

My 1957 Friden STW 10 mechanical calculator is due for an appearance in a high quality documentary about women that made mathematical calculations for NASA. But before the filming, I need to make sure it works.

More about the Friden STW10 on my website:

[kbnet_yt]

I've translated the Japanese for anyone like me who came along a year too late:

[Title Card: Cosmic Front ☆]
[the star is very important]
*Male Narrator:* America: those who undertook the Apollo program, and who did great feats. At space research facilities, many unknown women played a part.
[jump to Katherine Johnson section]
*Female Narrator:* In order to do this, humans made important calculations. The tools they used were pencil and paper…and a mechanical calculator.
[Caption: Electromechanical Calculating Machine]
*Female Narrator:* Inside are packed many thousands of parts. With the turning of gears, it goes about its mechanical calculations. A collector was kind enough to show us a period calculator.
[Caption: Marc Verdiell]
*Female Narrator:* For instance, 12 x 312 is…[clackclackclackclack]…3744, and there it is. But how is this calculated? The calculator splits it into the ones, tens, and hundreds place. First it multiplies the 2 in 312. 12 x 2 is 24. Then for the tens, 12 x 10 is 120. Adding 24, it's 144. Finally in the hundreds, 3600. Add it all up and you get the result: 3744.
*Extremely confident Japanese Marc:* Multiplication and division took a few seconds, which compared to doing it by hand, was far faster. PCs today would be done in a fifteenth of a second.
*Female Narrator:* What this calculator can do is high speed operations. Using this calculator, Katherine could make complicated calculations and complete the researchers' requests.

[guyfawkes]

I think it's incomprehensible that someone sat down, grabbed a pencil and some paper and said, "OK, lets design this complex piece of machinery". I mean, how do you even START such a task? Amazing machine!

[DaveHartman]

I like the Japanese version of you who did your voiceover

[donmoore]

Ms. Johnson died a little over a month ago, in February 2020. Glad this was made prior to her death. That is an astonishing piece of machinery. Great job debugging it, and great video. It is interesting that the Japanese recognized the significance of Ms. Johnson's work.

[SatelliteLily]

When I saw your calculator video Katherine Johnson was the first thing I thought of. It's great that you were part of a documentary that featured her story. That's so great!

[paulgracey]

In 1964 I began my career at Hughes Aircraft Co. My first job was with crystal filters for radio links and the R&D section was where I was assigned. Filters for both the Surveyor Moon lander and the Apollo Lunar Module were made in the same room, but not by me. In finding some of the right parameters for the filters I assembled and tuned, the chief engineer would let me use his Friden that would do square roots. I would go to the machine on his desk and put in the numbers and hit the odd button that started the process. Then I would go and get a cup of coffee to await the results, it was that slow, and extremely noisy. A year later and that engineer had one of the first Wang desktop calculators with the side unit for that purpose. Thanks for the peek inside and the oiling tools needed. I just might be able to reinvigorate an old IBM selectric I have.

[thesillyhatday]

This is one of the best peaces of engineering I've ever seen. Someone had to figure out how to do these functions through mechanics and then package it in a case, while also being reliable and completely accurate

[johanwesselink]

As always awesome. Like your videos very much. They are made with passion and have very high quality.

[rogerwhittle]

As alays, the YouTube algorithm seems to follow someone else and give me their first choices. After following the Apollo Guidance Computer series, it has completely forgotten my interest. I would have been very interested in this clip, because of Marc's references to 'bending' as a legitimate adjustment.


Many years ago - like half a century ago - I worked for NCR (National Cash Register) originally of Dayton Ohio, although I worked for them in London. NCR of course made cash registers, including the ubiquitous 100 Class. (In Britain, they were refered to as 'a till', is that the same?) The CRD (Cash Register Division) covered the whole range of similar machines, right up to vast, hotel billing machines (I can't remember the class.) I worked for AMD, Accounting Machine Division which covered everything from the simplest, hand cranked adding machines, up to the 'mighty' Class 31 mechanical accounting machine. (And beyond, to the Class 31M multiplier.)


When I first went to the training school for FE's - at Brent Cross, where the shopping mall is now - I had an instructor named Ron Tarling and it was he who introduced us the the strange set of tools most of us had never seen before. Bending bars. These were a set of different types of hard steel rod machined (in some cases forged) to bend a specific type of metal strip.


Your Friden was made up of hundreds of rods, bales, levers and pitmans (all American terms hardly ever used in British nomenclature) that were just stamped metal shapes, which could be altered to give a slightly different effect. Let's take a very simple 'teeter-totter' lever, pivoted roughly in the centre. If the 'input' of motion is on the left and 'output' on the right, by bending the flat of the right side with the appropriate bender (I can see it now) it was possible to shift the 'throw' of the output to give either more or less motion without moving the 'home position' of the input. Similarly, with a 'Pitman' - which, for my British colleagues, was a connecting rod, just a flat strip with a hole at either end which transmitted colinear motion - it was sometimes necessary to move the home position of the output end, by gently peining the flat of the pitman on the tiny anvil that was part of our tool kit.. Of course, it was not possible to reverse this process.


To this day, I can remember the aphorisms of our instructor Ron Tarling, one of which was "Metal don't f'in grow!" and another was; "You can't bend it straight!" and he was always referring to 'elonginated 'oles'. When I eventually ended up, many years later, working for another, even bigger, American Multinational, most of my peers had degrees and one or two of them Doctorates - I had nothing. No qualifications whatever, but what I learned from working on mechanical accounting machines put me on a level with and sometimes ahead of my much better qualified colleagues.


Very interesting vlog Marc and I spent the first couple of minutes of diagnosis yelling at my screen; "Where's the hand crank? You can't keep stabbing the power input like that!"

[lefthandedcat]

Who knew you had such a beautiful Japanese narration voice at the end! :P excellent to see global interest in such a fantastic machine!

[juweinert]

Could be me.
"Tomorrow the TV people are coming and I totally forgot the damn thing is broken. Oh well, got a long night time, so no worries"

[aphexteknol]

I’m just learning how to service manual typewriters, and they can be rather complex machines. That Friden calculator would scare me to death if I had to work on it!

[Lethaltail]

Love the music always going on when you're showing off your collection.

[antigen]

i am in AWE of anyone able to figure such a thing out after so little time spent with it!

[AbsoluteAstronaut]

What a beautiful machine. I'm very intrigued. Love these videos! thanks!

[Tangobaldy]

Tangobaldy is in awe of this machine. It can do math better than me. Good video.

[zh]

Fascinating as ever. Do you or the Museum have any examples of the Marchant mechanical calculator, which Richard Feynman mentions being used in the calculations for the Manhattan Project at Las Alamos?

[mechadrake]

tried youtube captions, to translate japanese for me. it was hilarious disaster, because it still thought it is in english :D
Awesome calculator and maintenance job.

[alanesq]

Nice to know you also also struggle with the manuals, I find them completely baffling and assumed it must just be me.
I am in the middle of restoring one myself, I thought I was doing really well until watching one of your videos where you are at about the same stage and you then tell us that at this point it gets really difficult - lol

[Kalumbatsch]

I looked if there were subtitles, but the only thing I got was stuff like "Bo Davari must give me kira quinoa soup greens on this" - I don't think that's a good idea with such a delicate piece of equipment.

When Marc operates the machine: "Sankyo for external kappa customer I messed up"
You forgot to turn off external kappa if you multiply by 312, but it's a very easy mistake to make. At least you used non-gmo lubricant.