ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Curta calculator

Okay kiddo, have you ever heard of a calculator? It's a tool that helps you do math. Well, the curta calculator is a special kind of calculator that people used a long time ago, way before electronic calculators were invented.

It's a little round tool that you hold in your hand, like a baseball or a toy ball. It has a bunch of different parts that move around and help you add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

To use it, you turn a little crank on the top of the curta calculator, which makes the parts inside move around and do the math for you. You can even use it to do tricky math like calculating square roots and trigonometry.

The curta calculator was invented by a man named Curt Herzstark in the 1940s. People used it a lot because it was easy to carry around, didn't need electricity, and was super good at doing lots of different kinds of math.

Today, most people use electronic calculators or just their phones to do math. But the curta calculator is still really cool and lots of people collect them as a fun piece of history!