A short History
I don't have a great deal of history about this Curta. My father owned a small engineering and surveying company in a small town named Grass Valley in northern California. It was a company that was founded by his father in the early 1900s. Grass Valley was part of the gold rush of the 1850s.
I spent my summers in high school and college surveying. In those pre-computer days, we used portable Monroe rotary calculators (L 160 Series) in the field and electric Monroe machines in the office. My father tells the story of when his father bought his first rotary calculator - after years of using logarithms - he worked up a few surveys with the calculator and then did it again with logs to satisfy himself that the calculator was correct. I still have a couple of those L 160 calculators around. When my father was in his 80s, he bought an HP-35 which I still have. Amazing that his lifetime spanned computational technology from logs to scientific calculators.
Somewhere in the late 1950s, a Curta salesman who happened by my father's office trying to sell some calculators left him the demonstration kit to try out. The Curta would have been ideal for survey crews that were carrying the Monroes along with transits and other surveying equipment in mountainous and rough terrain. He didn't ever buy any, I don't know whether it was the price or just that the surveyors had used the Monroes for years and just didn't want to change. Anyway, the salesman never came back to pick up his Curta, and it sat in our equipment room until 1996 when my father died, and I cleaned out his office. After keeping it for 14 years I finally decided after turning 70 that it was time to clean out things I don't need.
TERRY McGUIRE |
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