History of Science & Technology, Including the Life and Letters of Richard P. Feynman, and Space Exploration
History of Science & Technology, Including the Life and Letters of Richard P. Feynman, and Space Exploration
From the Computing History Collection of Serge Roube, via His Estate
David (Didier) Roth
Roth Adder, ca. 1840-44
Lot Closed
December 13, 08:42 PM GMT
Estimate
3,000 - 5,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
DAVID (DIDIER) ROTH
A Roth Adder-Subtractor (Additionneur-Soustracteur), ca. 1840-44. Signed to the bottom right of brass front plate, "Roth, Bté" (Breveté, or "Patented").
A brass and mahogany calculating machine in black wood display case, 8 number displays, zeroing arm absent. 13 1/2 x 2 3/8 x 1/2 in. (in case: 14 1/4 x 3 x 1 1/4 in.)
David Roth (1808-1885), also known as Didier Roth in his adoptive country of France, created a series of lightweight, portable, and refined calculating machines in the early 1840s, competing with the likes of Thomas de Colmar (see lot 43) and numerous other inventors during a period of burgeoning industrial output and commercial growth.
Born in Kossice, Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia), Roth seems to have been a member of the only Jewish family permitted to live within the city walls. Eventually leaving Kossice to study medicine in Vienna, he would establish himself as a homeopathic doctor in Paris in the 1830s, catering to some of the city's most prominent residents.
However, for just a few short years, from 1840 to 1844, Roth produced a series of mechanical calculators. In 1841, he visited with Charles Babbage to discuss the latter's attempts at creating a difference engine. In 1844, the same year he would stop making his machines and return to medicine full-time, Roth received a bronze medal for the Additionneur-Soustracteur at the French National Exhibition of Industrial Products, and a silver medal from the Societé d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale.
Roth is buried in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris, alongside such luminaries as physicist Léon Foucault, author Heinrich Heine, and fellow inventor Adolphe Sax, the creator of the saxophone.
Similar calculators to this one exist in the collection of the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris (Inventory numbers 04500-0000 and 11315-0007) and the Arithmeum in Bonn, Germany (Inventory number FDM4220). An Englishman, D.J. Wertheimber, patented his own version of Roth's calculating machine, one adapted to the non-decimal English currency of the time. A version of Wertheimber's Roth Adder exists in the Science Museum in London (Object number 1917-13).
RELATED LOTS:
Lot 43
REFERENCES:
Brody, Judit. "An émigré physician: Dr David (Didier) Roth, homeopath, art collector, and inventor of calculating machines." Journal of Medical Biography 8 (2000): 215-19.