If you've ever spent time thumbing through back issues of magazines like Scientific American or New Scientist, you may have seen adverts for the Curta – a strange little device that resembles a pepper mill. It cost a shocking amount of money and was claimed to perform all sorts of arithmetic functions purely mechanically and with incredible precision. Rather than being a scam in the order of upmarket X-ray specs, the Curta lives up to the claims and the story behind its creation has its roots in a Nazi death camp.
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