Hello everyone! While watching a video on the curta pocket calculator, i remembered (vaguely) that the first electro-mechanical or electrical computers were used in the military centers and also in universities. I also remembered (vaguely) that some well known scientists, like von Neumann, used some of those "new" computers to perform some computationally intensive calculations.
Then i realized that i never heard of mechanical calculators used intensively in any universities, scientific centers, R&D departments. The only usage, known to me, was the usage in shops and accounting (indeed the Pascaline was designed after the need of the Pascal's father in accounting).
I also know about the Babbage difference engine, that was designed to solve not only accounting problems, but it was never finished or used as far as i know.
The next thing i know is that humans were involved in long calculations, up to the usage of electrical computers, but still there was no account for usage of mechanical calculators by those people. Hence my question.
In the research I do on the Royal Observatory, Cape Town, and the various offices of the Surveyors-General in South Africa, the computing of coordinates was a major part of their work. However, there is no evidence (certainly not before 1910) of any kind of mechanical aid being employed beyond the all-important slide rule and books of mathematical tables for specialized reference. The actual computations were marked down long-hand on very big sheets and transferred to books, and much to my chagrin often survive where correspondence and financial accounts have been disposed of. True to form, I didn't photograph any of the computation sheets, because they annoy me. Now I wish I had! There are boxes and books just chock full of abstracts of angles, computation of spherical excesses, and so forth. I can show some of the cleaned-up results, but the actual sheets are a mess.
Also, in many of these offices, computers (as the job was known widely) were increasingly (young, single) women. This was less true in the Observatory than in the survey offices, where the computing staff was largely female by the 1920s thanks in part but not entirely to WWI. Nevertheless, they were always seen as more or less temporary workers performing repetitive mathematical tasks. The same was true of women on the drafting staff. This image from 1922 gives you an idea; the male clerical staff was similar in size, but not commingled in rank and work assignments. [edit: "Comp." stands for computer, "Dftsn." means attached to the drafting staff. Typist is, well, the designated typist; there were only a few typewriters in the office at that point.]
Some of my research takes place in a university's scientific object collection. I can corroborate your experience: there are few mechanical calculators in the collection that came from a university environment.
The reason for this seems quite simply that mechanical calculators typically perform only basic arithmetic and would only be worth it in a business or accounting environment where repeated but simple arithmetic is required. Having used a mechanical calculator, I can report that the addition of a column of numbers is faster on a mechanical calculator than on paper, and the multiplication of large numbers is similarly faster.
