TUSTIN, CALIF.: It was inevitable. After an item about slide-rule collectors appeared in this space in Fall 1993, it was only a matter of time before the logical next step would be taken. Sure enough, word has arrived of the International Association of Calculator Collectors (IACC), formed early last year by Guy Ball and Bruce Flamm, a pair of “dedicated (and slightly obsessed)” antiquarians in Southern California who between them own more than fifteen hundred portable calculators.

One might question the collectibility of objects so young that if they were human they couldn’t buy beer. But while 1970s cars, telephones, and toasters remain in daily use, a calculator from that era is as conspicuous today as a woman wearing a hoop skirt in an aerobics class. Electronic goods are like fruit flies, seemingly mutating by the minute, and a study of the two-plus decades since their commercial introduction is an accelerated lesson in the evolution of technology.

Consider, for example, the first true calculator, Texas Instruments’ “Cal Tech” prototype, completed in March 1967. It was built over two years to demonstrate the usefulness of the firm’s recently developed integrated circuits (ICs). Cal Tech was about half the size of a typical hard-cover book, weighed forty-five ounces, and could perform the four basic arithmetic functions, printing the results on a thin paper ribbon. It so impressed Texas Instruments’ management (and competitors) that soon an international race was on to make calculators smaller and smarter. More and more keys were packed into ever-tinier spaces —a mixed blessing for users with chubby fingers—and IC makers similarly crammed formerly unthinkable numbers of components onto a single chip. Eventually, of course, those chips went into the personal computers that devoured much of the market for highend calculators.

Collecting calculators has the disadvantage that they tended to be designed on utilitarian rather than aesthetic principles. Slide rules, with their hard edges and thin, precise lines, have an elegance and grace comparable to the best abstract art. Calculators, by contrast, are clunky—especially the early ones. Yet just as there are those who collect Hummel figurines, so there are people who think calculators have a goofy sort of charm. As Ball says, “What got me started was a Panasonic that just looked artistically neat.”

Beyond that, says Flamm, collecting calculators has other advantages: They’re cheap, and hundreds of models are available, many from small makers (including Dictaphone, Longines Symphonette, and Water Pik) whose stories offer a wide-open field for research. Flamm also suggests that his hobby is “manly,” since calculators are the only masculine collectibles available to those who lack the space for cars, motorcycles, and tractors and the enthusiasm for baseball cards. His arguments against beer cans and old copies of Playboy are not recorded.

In a recent issue of the group’s newsletter, one article begins: “Who can forget the ‘Bowmar Brain’ series of calculators from the early ’70s?” As technology continues its inexorable march, the IACC is working to ensure that no one ever will.

The IACC can be reached at 14561 Livingston Street, Tustin, CA 92680.

EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF: Residents of New York City have been called many things through the years, and one of the strangest epithets ever hurled came in 1904, when the Utica (N.Y.) Saturday Globe referred to its downstate neighbor as “the city of human prairie dogs.” The similarities are certainly numerous, but the Utica paper was referring specifically to New York’s newly opened subway system, which allowed residents to duck into the ground and resurface miles away. Since then the subway, for better and for worse, has embodied what New York City is about. As Clifton Hood writes in his recently published 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (Simon & Schuster, $25): “What subject is better suited to popular interest in history than the New York subway? You can touch the subway, see it, hear it, and ride it.” (You can also sometimes smell it, but the author tactfully refrains from mentioning this.)

Hood lists earlier attempts at building a subway, including Alfred Beach’s pneumatic railway of the 1870s, and then describes the current system’s history, starting with its proposal by Mayor Abram S. Hewitt in 1888. Hewitt, a fierce nativist who refused to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade because he thought the Irish should start acting American, saw mass transit as the only way New York’s homegrown population could escape the encroachments of foreign hordes. He would have been shocked to see the polyglot city that resulted when subway lines extended deep into formerly remote areas, allowing immigrants to establish new enclaves throughout the city.

There are many aspects to the story—engineering, social, economic—but Hood goes into particular depth on the political details, which get complicated enough to make a New York subway map look simple. The common thread running from the 188Os to the 1950s (when the narrative ends) is the question of whether mass transit should be considered a public or private enterprise. Various hybrid schemes have been tried through the years, but it has never been resolved whether the subways should be run like a government service, with low fares and heavy subsidy, or a business, financing itself with fare receipts. The result is yet another example of a maxim familiar to everyone who deals with public works: As hard as they are to design and build, keeping them running is often an even bigger challenge.

Speaking of trains, when John H. White, Jr., started planning the Smithsonian Institution’s Railroad Hall in 1958, he looked all over for a complete history of railroading—one that would tell about cargo, signaling, equipment, and the life of the crews as well as give rates and profits and mileage. White couldn’t find such a book, so he wrote it himself.

Or, more properly, he wrote them himself, for during his thirty-year career at the Smithsonian, White produced several comprehensive tomes on all aspects of railroading. The latest, published last fall, is The American Railroad Freight Car: From the Wood-Car Era to the Coming of Steel (Johns Hopkins, $125).

White found that the Smithsonian had a considerable collection of railroad records and documents, but assembling it all into cohesive form could be as complicated as piecing together the Dead Sea Scrolls. In writing his book, White drew on trade and technical journals; census records; old schedules, manifests, and conductors’ reports; and thousands of photographs, each of which, to a specialist like White, contains a wealth of useful information not apparent to the rest of us. (See, for example, “A Few Words About This Picture,” Invention & Technology , Fall 1987.)

The author delves into the bizarrely complicated world of freight classification, where different goods were assessed different fees for the most arbitrary of reasons. This system eventually got so unwieldy that there were listings for such arcana as slipperyelm bark and yak fat. White also explains the problems many lines had with traffic that went predominantly in one direction, leaving a long string of empties for the return trip. Few roads were as lucky as the Bessemer & Lake Erie, which had steady business hauling coal north and iron ore south.

After minutely describing the life and operations of a freight line and its workers, the book turns to specialized types of cars: eight-wheel gondolas and hoppers, coal “jimmies,” livestock cars, as well as the familiar caboose. The technology of the cars receives similarly exhaustive treatment: thirtyseven pages on couplers and draft gears and forty-three pages on trucks, for example.

The American Railroad Freight Car was intended as a reference book, and it certainly fulfills that role; but like all great reference books, it affords pleasure to the browser just as much as to the researcher. Whenever his successors at the Smithsonian need to know something about trains, White’s books will likely be the first place they turn. The same should be true for anyone interested in how a growing America was powered, built, and fed.

ARLINGTON, VA.: The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) convened here in October, with participants continuing the tendency of recent years to expand the limits of the discipline. Today’s typical paper is as likely to cover how people felt about a particular technology, how it was sold to the public, or what the metaphors used to present it reveal, as it is to be about the minutiae of the technology itself. Old magazine advertisements were a staple of many presentations at the conference, so if you want to get a jump on the historians of the future, pay close attention to the ads in this issue.

The trend extends to the new editor of Technology & Culture ( T&C ), SHOT’S journal. To replace Robert C. Post, who has held the job since 1981, the society chose John Staudenmaier, a professor at the University of Detroit. Staudenmaier is widely known for his penetrating analyses of what’s behind the rhetoric used to describe technology by historians, museums, boosters, politicians, and the like. (For an interview of Staudenmaier by Post, see “The Frailties and Beauties of Technological Creativity,” Invention & Technology , Spring 1993.) It’s safe to assume that under his leadership, T&C will continue to increase the number of avenues by which scholars can approach technology—and that future SHOT meetings will be even more freewheeling.