Washimore Wander: Part 2

The George Washington Masonic Memorial itself was up on a hill, so we got a view of Alexandria (which wasn't so interesting, since we didn't really have that much knowledge of Alexandria's layout), and could see the Washington Monument in the distance.

Upon entering the Memorial building itself, we were greeted by an old white guy who started telling us about some of the things to see there. I guess he was some kind of guide. I wondered if he was a Mason. I wondered if people who responded to his greeting with the proper handshake got directed somewhere special. He rattled on for a while about the things to see. He talked about how George Washington had been a mason. He talked about the murals behind him. About the statue behind him. We didn't care. We wanted to get past this guy. Other people were coming in, but he wouldn't talk with them. He kept talking at us. I guess I should be glad we were able to help those other people enter the building without being accosted. Eventually my dad managed to get in a "ThankyousomuchWe'lljusttakealookaroundnow" and we scurried off, free.

This was a combination museum and functioning Masonic lodge. We got to see historical artifacts from George Washington's time, both some miscellaneous objects and some having to do with Masonic tradition. There were pictures (and a statue) of Masons in full regalia, so I was able to see their aprons with mystical symbols, and some robes. There were trowels which were used in masonic rituals concerning laying cornerstones for foundations. We saw Washington's T-square. One of the straps used to carry his coffin was on display, and featured many Masonic symbols, including dividers, t-square, bob, and a glowing eye. There were small stones on pedestals which were used to pound gavels on. There were displays about some societies: The Daughters of Job, the Order of DeLoy (sp?). There was a large oriental rug--the guy at the door claimed that this was the largest Oriental rug in the world. Maybe he was right. Nobody had asked me about it.

There was a large rock, which they claimed was from the Temple of Solomon. You know, that temple whose proportions are supposed to be based on all sorts of important ratios that are part of the mysteries behind Western magical tradition, the tradition behind the Masonic mysteries. Oooh. Aaah. I wish I had brought my tape measure, I would have measured the stone. Offhand, I think it was about the size of my torso. But I really didn't check too carefully.

There were various wall carvings which would show a coat of arms in which the heraldic shield was canted at a strange angle. Maybe 15 degrees off the level. Weird. There was a gift shop where you could buy various Masonic doo-dads, but it was pretty crowded, so I didn't get a chance to look very closely. It might have been interesting, but I wasn't up for a prolonged bout of jostling.

There was a display showing which U.S. Presidents had been Masons. There were quite a few of them. I wasn't sure if I should believe the display. So many secret societies will say "You heard of Socrates? Yeah, he was one of us. Sure you never heard about it--we're a secret society."

We took our leave of Alexandria and made the drive up to Hagerstown, Maryland. This was the home of Bob and Kelly Wilhelm, friends of the family who had lived in San Francisco for a while. Bob is a professional storyteller, and Bob and Kelly together organize tours in which they take people to some foreign land, show them various old landmarks, and Bob tells stories that somehow concern the places or landmarks.

We checked into our hotel. I noted that they had MTV, and was filled with a sense of profound relief. We got our luggage stowed in the room, got back in the car, and eventually found our way to Bob and Kelly's house. This was definitely out in the suburbs. The houses were all tens of meters apart, and people had large front yards with grass, tulips, shrubs, trees, and daffodils.

When we arrived at the house, we saw many bulb plants growing and a green lawn. We wandered up to the front door and rang the doorbell. There was no response. I looked in a window, and was able to see out another window that Kelly was in a garden behind the house. We wandered around to the back.

The garden had many interesting plants, most of which I forget the names of because I'm not that hep on the plant scene. In fact, it was during this very visit that I learned how to tell a pansy from a primrose. (Primroses have wrinkled leaves; pansy leaves have a more scalloped edge and have a sort of lion face pattern on the flower.)

Bob wandered out and we sat in the back yard, drinking sasparilla (sp?) and listening to fun anecdotes from their travels. In Kilkenny Castle (in Ireland?) they had encountered an old man, the last heir to Kilkenny. The rule could only be passed to a male heir, and he had had only daughters. The daughters had fought the impending loss of the castle, and had tried to devise schemes of marrying their cousins to continue the line and keep the castle in the family. But all the schemes had fallen apart. In the end, one of the daughters hired some thugs to break into the castle and steal the items which were most important to the family. I seem to recall Bob saying that he had heard that both daughters were living in America, in which case I guess that means that the Kilkenny family treasure is in America somewhere. Weird.

Kelly's first name isn't really Kelly. Her full name is Mary Jo (sp?) Kelly Wilhelm--Kelly was her maiden name. Her father was some Navy bigwig who did a lot of submarine-detection work--laying cables which would be used to detect submarines passing nearby. He has since passed away, but he left Mary Jo an old mechanical calculator.

From its look and color scheme, I would have guessed it was a product of the 50s. My mom had an adding machine from that era, a huge desktop device about the size of a modern cash register--only most of the space was taken up with clockwork, not a money drawer. This was something different--it was a compact mechanical calculator. It fit in a camera lens case. How to describe it in ASCII? Hmm.

I'm going to try anyhow. (And I'm going on about it for a while, so if you don't think you'll be interested, maybe you should go to the next page.) This thing was mostly grey metal, a cylinder about three inches long and two inches in diameter. There were many digits displayed in little windows. On the top of the cylinder there was a crank--giving it a full turn would cause some of the digits displayed to change.

            (Crank)                                  
   (Weird Belt Loop Thing)                           
 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 |   
==================================================

==================================================
                     ^                 ^               
                     |                 |             
                                                    
 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0                              
                                                    
 D D D D D D D D D D D                              
 | | | | | | | | | | |    D                         
 | | | | | | | | | | |    |
 | | | | | | | | | | |
 | | | | | | | | | | |
==================================================
==================================================

On the bottom of the slide bar was just brand name information, plus a note that the thing had been manufactured in Luxemborg.

In the time since I wrote this travelog, I've done some web surfing and learned more about these Curta brand calculators, and found this cool photo by Greg Saville.

My dad played with the calculator for a while. He found out that moving a slide bar affected the digit directly over that slide bar. Turning the crank then added the number in the slide-bar digits to the number on the top of the cylinder, the one whose digits were on the black background. Except that the last four digits of that number didn't change.

He was able to tug on the crank, pulling it out a bit from the top of the cylinder. This revealed a red-painted band around the base of the crankshaft. When the crank was in this pulled-out position, then the number above the slide bars would get subtracted from the number with the black background instead of added.

We started referring to the number with the black background as the running total. My dad said he figured that the other number on the top of the cylinder--the one whose digits had the silver background--was probably used for division.

Then I started playing with the device. I noticed that each time I turned the crank, the number on the silver background went up by one. Except if I pulled the crank out to put the thing into subtraction-mode, the number on the silver background went down by one. I started thinking of the number on the silver background as the count.

I figured that was for multiplication: if you want to compute 374 x 484, you would make sure that you had a zero running total, a zero count, and wiggle the slide bars to make their number come up 484, you could start wailing on the crank. You'd watch the count, and when it hit 374, then you'd know you'd added 374 484's to the running total. Therefore the running total would be 374 x 484. If you got into such a cranking frenzy that you went past 374 turns, you could pull the crank out into subtraction mode, and turn it a few times until you'd counted down to 374.

The binary switch next to the slide-bars reversed the direction of the count--that is, made it so that the count went up one with every subtraction and down one with each addition. I figured out how to use this set-up to do division, but I'm not going to go into the details, because you're either (a) pretty bored by this whole aside, or (b) capable of figuring it out yourself.

I still didn't know how to set the bottom four digits of the running total or the count. Then someone figured it out--if you tugged and twisted, you could actually rotate the top of the cylinder. Thus, instead of

 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 |   
==================================================   
==================================================
                     ^                 ^            
                     |                 |            
                                                    
 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0                              

...you could have...

 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 |   
==================================================   
==================================================
                             ^                 ^            
                             |                 |            
                                                    
         0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0                              

This allows you to enter a digit at a time. Like, to multiply 374 by 484, you would load up 484 and crank four times. Then you'd rotate the top of the cylinder by one digit. Then you'd crank seven times. Rotate the top of the cylinder once more and crank three times. Because each rotation effectively means that whatever you do next will be multiplied by 10, you get a quick way to deal with large numbers.

There were just two mysteries left about the device's use: what was the weird belt-loop thing for? And there had to be a quick way to zero the thing. You could zero it by reversing all your operations, but that took forever. Someone else discovered that the funny-looking belt-loop thing was used to zero the device. If you put it in your finger, you could "dial" it as you would the dial on an old phone. When you were done, the running total and count would both be zero.

What a savagely beautiful device.

Addendum: I remembered that Piaw had mentioned that one of his officemates had such a device. So I sent him this travelogue, asking about it.

Piaw writes:
Yep, I think you described the mechanical device in Stan's office. It's kinda neat, and apparently was very popular when he was in school in the late 60s early 70s. Apparently there are algorithms for doing logarithmic and trignometric functions using such devices. (Sounds like a good topic for a Rivendell Reader article :-)

Stan writes:
Indeed, it is a Curta Calculator, made in Liechtenstein. I have one right here in my desk. Used it in my Physics classes in college (electronic calculators were new, and pretty expensive).

Not only can they add, subtract, multiply, and divide with 15 place accuracy, they can extract square and cube roots. I used to remember the algorithm (it's basically divide and average), but it is lost in the recesses of my mind. Old age and parenthood are to blame, I suppose. Certainly not the drugs.

I write:
Once you became proficient with this device, how do you hold it?

I ended up just holding the thing in my left hand and doing all manipulation of gadgetry using the right. It felt like I should have been able to speed things up by using the fingers of my left hand, if only I could have figured out something worthwhile for them to do.

Stan writes:
That's the ticket -- left hand holding it, right hand fiddling with the knobs. Speed is relative: even with this relaxed way of using it, you're lightyears ahead of pencil pushers. It might be slow compared to an HP calculator, but those didn't exist. And it's way more accurate than a slide rule. Hey, I've got one of them here too...

I think other students disliked the calculator. Here they were, struggling along, and some joker is back there with a pepper grinder, making this grinding noise, and (worst of all) smiling.

In retrospect, it's almost scary how excited I got about that calculator.

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