Unfortunately, after a long successful and inventive stretch under its visionary founder, it all went downhill fast when it was purchased in 1965 by the German company Singer, which was unable to capitalize on Friden's early lead in electronic calculators. The Friden company was founded in 1934 during the great depression by Swedish immigrant Carl Friden, and operated near San Francisco in San Leandro, California. The last mechanical model, the SRW 10, had a square root function! Finally, in 1962, Friden introduced one of the earliest transistorized electronic calculators, the EC-130, and then in 1964 the EC-132 which added a square root function. The later ones, like my 1956 STW 10, were electrically driven and featured multiplication and division. The early ones like the 1941 Friden H8 (see video below) featured only additions and subtraction and were manually actuated. They were impressively large and fast, and built like tanks. The Friden calculators were very popular professional calculators in the US in the 1940's and 1950's.
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