Back in the 1950s, mechanical calculators didn’t have the safety checks modern computers do. So when someone tried dividing by zero, the machine didn’t flash an error it went berserk. The gears would spin endlessly, trapped in a chaotic loop, because the calculator was trying to compute something that simply can’t exist. Engineers jokingly called this a “Sahar,” a reminder that even machines can lose their minds when logic breaks. It’s a strange, beautiful glimpse of how early hardware exposed t

Phoenix Number via Curta Calculator: a crazy property of the “Phoenix number” 142857 is demonstrated on this vintage mechanical calculator. Every turn of the crank handle adds the number in the side register to the top register, hence the top number is the side number multiplied by the number of turns of the crank. Note when 142857 is multiplied by 1 through 6, the same digits appear in the answer and in the same order! 142857 is a cyclic number where integer multiples are numerical anagrams of