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Frank Stephen Baldwin
By Lawrence Hardy
FRANK STEPHEN BALDWIN
The innovation, known as the Baldwin Principle, with a single wheel supplants the cumbersome and heavy 9-gear apparatus of the Step Reckoner - created by Leibniz and popularized by Thomas’s Arithmometer - with a smaller single wheeled variable-toothed mechanism or pinwheel. The new system’s configuration contained a cam mechanism rotated by means of a lever eliminating the need for a reversing mechanism present in the Thomas Arithmometer. Accordingly, when the cam contacts the different spring loaded rods, they extend from the surface of the disk according to the operator's need. For example, as shown in Drawing - 1, the operator set the lever to the fifth position, which resulted in the cam having five gear teeth, when rotated; the number five is added to whatever amount is stored on the wheel (Aspray, Broomley, Ceruzzi, & Williams, 1990). Baldwin was born in New Harford, Connecticut in 1838; he grew up in Nunda, New York. He enrolled at Union College in Schenectady, but soon left college to take over the family architectural business. After the Civil War, he moved to Saint Louis and went to work for Peck’s Planing Mill. While working at the planing mill, he invented a device that measured the board feet of in a given quantity of lumber by direct measurement. The device measured the lumber’s length by turning a knob. A tape measured the width. The totals accumulated on one or more sets of dials.
Shortly thereafter, Charles H. Peck, co-owner of the planing mill and President of St. Louis Life Insurance Company permitted Baldwin to examine and study the design and construction of a company owned Thomas Arithmometer. As stated above, Baldwin filed a caveat with the U. S. Patent office for his invention in 1872. He called his new machine the Baldwin Arithmometer (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008). He received the patent for his invention in 1875. Baldwin and associates attempted to market the new calculator now labeled as Baldwin's 1875 machine but were unable to generate much interest in the calculator. Baldwin believed there was a market for his calculator in the financial centers of the East Coast. However, after two years of effort he was able to sell only five machines. He soon returned to Saint Louis and resumed his career as an architect. Even so, he remained interested in inventing and mechanical calculating machines and took out several more patents on calculators in the twentieth century (Computer Museum of America, 2006) (Redin, 2007) (IBM, 1994) (Kidwell, 2000).
In 1900, Baldwin patented the Baldwin Computing Engine; the Baldwin Calculator built in 1902 followed Baldwin Computing Engine. Neither of which achieve the desired commercial success Baldwin desired. Baldwin did not achieve real commercial success until he collaborated with Jay Randolph Monroe in 1912 and adapted a full keyboard to the Baldwin Calculator. Shortly thereafter, the company changed its name to the Monroe Calculating Machine Company. A decade later Monroe pioneered electro-mechanical calculators. The Company assumed the named of Monroe The Calculator Company.
Legend has it that Baldwin's pinwheel calculator was built in the Saint Louis machine shop of Edmund Burroughs. According to this folklore, Burroughs’s son William constructed the first Baldwin Calculator in 1873. However, after further investigation, city records show that Edmund Burroughs did not move to the Saint Louis area until the late 1870s, and his son William did not move to Saint Louis until 1881. However there is a distinct possibility the younger Burroughs examined the Baldwin 1875 Arithmometer around 1881, but there is no substantive evidence to verify the notion either (Kidwell, 2000).
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This intel was contributed by hodari
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May, 2012
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