The Odhner LuSiD, a strange pinwheel calculator for British currency

[@stephenfreeborn]

This just popped up on my feed. I had wanted to see this in action. What a steep learning curve. Thanks for showing it.

[@MattMcIrvin]

This is utterly bizarre. I've seen plenty of adding machines with special columns to handle pre-decimal British currency, but none before that attempted to do this with input in decimal fractions of a pound and mechanical conversion to sterling currency on the fly.

[@jaapsch2]

In many calculations, such as my example, the input is just a decimal number as it is a multiplier for the currency amount constructed in the counter. This is a great machine for such multiplications, but if you just want to add a list of currency values like an adding machine? No way.

[@marcomartinello03]

Wow I never seen an Original Odhner whit British currency....before this video I was actually amazed just to see an Olivetti summa prima 20 Sterling. Keep bringing us beautiful calculators!

[@TheAncientAstronomer]

Yeah the British currency used to be seriously LSD!😁

[@friiq0]

Woah, I had no idea they ever made a pinwheel calculator for a mixed-base system like this. It would be cool to see one that adds seconds, minutes, hours, all the way up to days, weeks and even years. Now that I think of it, you would need quite large wheels to display all 60 seconds and minutes, not to mention all 365 days. Perhaps you could manage it with those shifting windows somehow. I'd also love to see a pinwheel calculator that works in hexadecimal. I doubt the market for one ever existed, but I bet that would be a really fun 3D printing project for the right person!

[@jaapsch2]

There were small adders for hexadecimal (I have a Dial-A-Matic adder for hex, and there were hex addiators too), but I don't know of any larger machine for that. I do have a booklet about an octal calculator by Monroe - octal was widely used before 8-bit and hexadecimal became standard.

[@ChrisStaecker]

Wild! All the nonsense they had to go through to make this machine work - seems very confusing, but I really don’t know how they could’ve done it any better with this kind of machine. Nice editing too!

[@nmmm2000]

This is really very complicated for my brain. Poor British Emipre citizens 😂😂😂 Is even more complicated than callendar system with seconds, minutes, hours, day, weeks, years.