ONE OF THE EARLIEST OVERVIEWS OF CALCULATING MACHINES OF ITS KIND, WITH SIGNIFICANT EPHEMERA.
Small 8vo, 158 printed pages, engraved portrait frontispiece and figures in text. Very mild age-toning. 10.5 x 15 cm. Original dark blue cloth-backed boards. Buff printed paer covered boards, the upper with lettering and publication date,the lower with central engraved portrait vignette within twin black printed borders. (slightly rubbed with some extremely slight staining).
"THE ARITHMACHINIST " was published in Chicago, USA, in 1898 , intended to both publicize the adding machine and act as a self-instructing manual panorama of existing adding machines. In its 158 pages the author—Henry Goldman, not only described the existing state-of-the-art in this area, examining many calculating devices, including these of Stephenson, Lightning, Webb, Jewett, Locke, Wilson, McClelland, Landin, Wiberg, Thomas, Tate, Burkhardt, Baldwin, Grant, Spaulding, Bouchet, Contograph, Hopkins, Thatcher, Odhner, Brunsviga, Fuller, Thompson, Smith, Sexton, etc., but also proposed his own adding machine, the so called Arithmachine.
Heinrich Goldmann (a.k.a. Henry Goldman) was an Austrian Jew, who was born in Vienna in 1859, came to the United States in 1881, and published on improved bookkeeping and office machines. In 1890s, Goldman created a small adding machine of the type generally known as chain setting because it has a number of chain loops (one for each digit) that can be moved with a stylus.
This small metal pocket calculator, with dimensions 4½" x 1½" x 3½" and weight about a pound, has nine columns of chains. The two rightmost are silver-colored, the next three copper-colored, the next three silver-colored, and the leftmost copper-colored. In back of the chains are nine numeral wheels with the digits from 0 to 9 on them. Digits are marked in red and in black on plastic strips to the right and to the left of the chains. A zeroing wheel is on the right side, with a release button below it for resetting everything to zero. A movable metal decimal marker is attached to the machine between the chains and the numeral wheels. The metal stand has a rubber covering along the two edges of its base. The black wooden case is covered with leather and lined with fabric-covered paper. It has a top sliding index plate with a Celluloid inset that can be written on with pencil. There is a sliding index button at each side of the readout, a sliding index pointer below the readout.
The chains are wrapped around a register, so any movement of the chain will rotate (add to) the result register. Goldman’s device, which he called Contostyle or Arithstyle in Europe and Arithmachine in America, was only able to add; subtraction was done by adding complementary digits. The machine was reset to zero by turning the large wheel seen in the illustration. It was manufactured in Chicago by his company International Arithmachine Co. The 1899 price was $24-$48. In 1905, Goldman left the United States for Berlin, where he arranged to have his adding machine manufactured by Gesellschaft für Maschinenbau GmbH, Berlin, as the Contostyle. The Arithstyle was a similar machine on Goldman's design, manufactured in New York sometime after 1910 by Arithstyle Co.
Goldmann received quite a few US and foreign patents for Arithmachine and its successors—US patents №№ 624788, 617094, 669969, 669970, 681781, patents in Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, etc.
WITH Two identical original trade-marked instruction cards (5 x 8 cm). Printed in black on both sides. Plus a purple-ink typed letter from Edward List (Secretary & Treasurer of the International Arithmachine Company, "capital $100,000"), dated October 12th 1999. It is addressed to John K. Royal, City Treasurer , Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and responds to a technical question about using the Arithmachine. It is signed by a rubber stamped signature. The verso is a reprint form the Sunday Times-Herald, Chicago, February 19th, 1899, that is a four-column, full-page descriptive summary of the Arithmachine with two large vignette illustrations.
ERWIN TOMASH G51.