If your grandmother ever used an adding machine at her job in the 1960s, she was operating a device whose roots go all the way back to a workshop in Florence, and to a brilliant, but often forgotten, Italian inventor named Tito Filippo Gonnella.
Born in Livorno in 1794, Gonnella earned his doctorate at the University of Pisa and went on to teach mathematics and mechanics at Florence’s prestigious Accademia di Belle Arti. He was the kind of man who couldn’t look at a problem without wanting to solve it: and in 19th-century Italy, one of the biggest problems was arithmetics. Back then, all calculations were slow, done entirely by hand, and error-prone, unless you were extra careful or a pro at maths.
