Show LIGHTNING CALCULATORS J The murder of his wife recently by Professor J D Andrews the Lightning Calculator whose mind has finally given way under the I strain to which it had been put may make of interest a few notes on these phenomenal calculators and notably the young Zerah Colburn who was born in Cabot Vt in 1804 and died in 1840 was among the most remarkable of the Calculating Boys At the age of six he had given such evidence of his extraordinary powers of computation that his father resolved to show him in public pub-lic Among the questions which he solved at this period were such as How many days and hours in 1811 years Answer in twenty seconds sec-onds 661025 days 15864360 hours or How many seconds in eleven years Answer in four seconds sec-onds 346896000 Two years later when they were showing show-ing him in Europe he performed in I a few seconds such calculations as I squaring 998999 and multiply the product twice by 49 and once by 25 or finding the factors of 2 to the thirtysecond power plus 14204 967297 Colburn immediately gave 641x6700417 and when asked the factors of 247483 replied instantaneously instan-taneously 941 and 263 and they are the only factors Such problems as raising 8 to the sixteenth power giving the square root of 106929 or the cube root of 268336175 were solved in a moment At this Period Colburn was ignorant of the ordinary rules of arithmetic and i could not tell how or why particular particu-lar processes came into his mind though later he could analyze and describe his methods Once when bidden to multiply 21734 by 543 his manner provoked a question and it was found that for some reason which he could not explain he was obtaining the result by multiplying mul-tiplying 65202 by 181 The late Mr George Parker Bidder cultivated his remarkable faculty to a highly useful use-ful purpose When in his sixth year he used to amuse himself by counting up to 10J then to 1000 then to 1000000 by degrees he accustomed ac-customed himself to contemplate the relations of high numbers and In childhood he invented processes of his own by which mentally he could perform calculations more rapidly and accurately than others could with pencil and paper by the ordinary rules At the age of ten we read that he answered in two minutes the question What is the interest of 1444 for 4444 days at 4jz per cent per annum V Answer 2434 15s 53d A few months later when he was not yet eleven years old he was asked How long would a cistern 1 mile cube be filling fill-ing if receiving from a river 120 gallons per minute without intermission inter-mission V In two minutes he gave the correct answer14 300 years 285 days12hrs and 46min A year later he divided correctly less than a minute 468592413568 by 9076 At 12 years of age he answered in less than a minute the question If a distance of 99 inches is passed over in a second of time how many inches will be passed over in 365d 5h 4Sin 55s Much more surprising however was his success when 13 years old in dealing with the question What is the cube root Of 897339273974002155 He obtained the answer in 2 minutes viz 964537 Jedediah Buxton was another prodigious calculator more remarkable in some respects than either Colburn or Bidder He never learned to write and in other branches of education was as backward back-ward as a boy of 10 while his mental men-tal faculties were slow saving always al-ways his faculty of calculation So completely was he absorbed in his theme that he took little cognizance of external objects save as they suggested sug-gested themselves Thus if a period of time or the age of a man were spoken of Buxton at once announced that that made so many seconds and a distance was to him so many hairbreadths By walking over the fields of Sir John Rhodes lordship of Elinton his step was as infallible as a surveyors sur-veyors chainBuxton gave the proprietor their contents of some thousands of acres first in acres then in roods perches square feet square inches and finally in square hairbreadthsfortyeight to each side of an inch He had the faculty of being able to rest a calculation at any stage and take it up next morning morn-ing a week later or after a lapse of months He could number all the pints of beer he had ever drunk at all the houses he had ever visited in half a century Among the problems prob-lems given him to solve were such as this How many cubical eighths of an inch are there in a quadrangular quadran-gular mass 23145789 yards long 5642732 yards wide and 54966 yards thick an appalling calculation cal-culation which he performed mentally Once he set himself to doubling a farthing 140 times and on another occasion he made himself him-self in his own phrase drunk with reckoning by calculating how many hairs an inch long and how many grains ot eight different sorts of cereals there were in a mass of 200000000000 cubic miles having hav-ing previously counted the hairs and grains in a single inch to get his point of departure What was most curious about Buxton perhaps was his capacity for carrying on these calculations while conversing or listening At church he only cared to count the words of the sermon and though he watched Garrick closely in Richard in it was but to reckon the words in the part In 1839 there was shown at Paris the 11 earold son of a Sicilian shepherd one Vito ilangiamele who did some remarkable mental men-tal calculating Thus he extracted the cube root of 3769416 in half a minute and the tenth root of 282 475249 in three minutes and a half Another shepherd bey Jacques Ynandi was brought out by Flam marion at Paris about six years ago who answered very rapidly such questions as How many kilome tres distance has a man 80 years old traveled through space with the world moving at the rate of twenty nine kilometres a second or One person is born every secondhow many have been born since the birth of Christ including the leap years At the same time they were showing show-ing in Germany an Syearold Hungarian Hun-garian calculating boy named Moritz Mor-itz Frankl who answered offhand such questions as these A man dies at the age of 62 years S months and 17 days When he was fourteen four-teen years and a half old he began to drink beer at the rate of six sie dels and two schnitte per diem and continued so to do until the day of his death Now a siedel costs fifteen pfennige and eschnitt ten ennige How many pfennige did he spend upon beer between his twentyninth semester and his demise de-mise In less than half a minute young Frankl was ready with his answer Pa haps as remarkable a feat in connection with numbers as any of these though it rested solely upon the memory was that of Eu ler who it is said carried in his head the first six powers of every number up to 100 His power of analysis was no less phenomenal than his memory and even before his sight failed him he had long been accustomed to performing elaborate el-aborate calculations in his mind New York World |