Facit T
1932 · Pinwheel · Work 419 of 1,871
A Swedish calculating machine with a key-set pinwheel mechanism, ten columns of small round keys arranged in a stepped block across the front, each key cap bearing exactly one digit from 0 to 9, a slim carriage above with a row of numeral windows, each window showing the single digit 0, a lever for clearing at the right, the body in black enamel with nickel fittings, every other surface plain black enamel, standing on a dark baize-covered table before a deep neutral background, a single raking light from the left raking across the stepped bank of keys.
- What it was used for
- A pinwheel machine with a ten-key board instead of setting levers, built by Facit in Åtvidaberg, Sweden. John Wolff describes what the engineer Karl Rudin rebuilt in the 1930s: result and revolution registers are fixed at the top, the rotor travels horizontally beneath them - which does away with the external moving carriage which on the early, Odhner-like Facit machines had extended beyond the body. The setting levers were replaced by a two-row Dalton keyboard. The Model T of 1932 works to 9 x 8 x 13 places. On John Wolff's account Facit at its peak had over a thousand employees and agents in a hundred countries.
- What was new
- Not the ten-key board - Rudin took over the two-row Dalton keyboard. What was new at Facit was the combination, on John Wolff's account a radical design change: a four-function machine in which the number is keyed rather than set by levers, and in which the moving carriage disappears. The Centre for Computing History calls the Model T of 1932 the first of the inverted Facit pinwheel calculators and records that this basic ten-key mechanism stayed in production with only minor changes for almost 40 years, from the mid-1930s into the 1970s. The dates differ: John Wolff gives founding in 1918 in Stockholm and joining the Åtvidaberg industries in 1924; the Centre for Computing History gives 1922 as the founding of AB Åtvidabergs Industrier, into which Facit was incorporated the same year. The end came with electronics: from 1966 Facit sold electronic calculators made in Japan, and by about 1972 the prices had met.