I worked one of these in a bank in the City of London during a vacation job in the late 1960s. After a couple of days got to be incredibly fast and accurate. By the time I got to use one the concept was around 300 years old.
In models with a bell it would also ring on underflow, which was an additional cue (other than a significantly larger force required to turn the crank and the sound of all the digits turning at once) during division.
@lcamtuf fun fact, my mother did the math, and it would take four years with a mechanical calculator to process process all the data for her thesis, or one or two years to learn how to program and another year to run the data. There is so much we take for granted in this world now with respect to computation.
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