Mental Calculation
From the 1800s, Americans increasingly used numbers to make calculations in their heads that they used to describe the world around them. Schoolchildren learned to do basic arithmetic with paper and pencil. Objects such as slates, first found in the classroom, came to be owned by individuals.
Slate with numeral frame, around 1890
Paper was expensive in the 1800s. As the graphic from a textbook cover suggests, some students learned to calculate at the blackboard. Others used slates. The beads at the top of this personal slate helped with counting and simple arithmetic.
Gift of Edith R. Meggers
Grandma’s Arithmetical Game, around 1915
Card games like this one, played at home, reinforced the arithmetic children learned at school.
Aids for Commerce and Consumers
Beginning in the 1880s, business and government employees across the nation calculated with machines. Some operators received special training from vendors, while others learned on the job. Especially from the 1920s, consumers also purchased relatively inexpensive, portable adding machines.
Kim Dong Kuen’s abacus, around 1900
Kim Dong Kuen and his wife, early Korean settlers in Hawaiʻi, owned this abacus of Chinese design. The abacus was an ancient computing device that, by the 1800s, was widely used in much of Asia, including Russia.
Gift of Dana Tai Soon Burgess
Nannie Burroughs’s cash register, around 1905
From 1909 until her death in 1961, Nannie Burroughs was the president of a business college for African American students in Washington, D.C. This cash register, marked with her name, was used to teach students at the school.
Gift of Nannie Helen Burroughs School
Joseph Hirshhorn’s Addometer, around 1927
Businessman Joseph Hirshhorn, who would give his art collection to the Smithsonian Institution, owned one of the first examples of this adding machine. Sales of the instrument continued into the mid-1900s, as the advertisement attests.
Transfer from Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Judy Wallace’s pocket counter, around 1975
Judy Wallace used this pocket calculator to tally her spending as she shopped. She received the simple adding machine as an advertisement from Gino’s, a fast-food restaurant in Maryland.
Gift of Harold D. Wallace Jr.
