Finess E
When this little thing turned up on a french second hand website, I could not resist making an offer on it, becasue I had been keeping an eye out for one for a long time, and they are rare as hens’ teeth.
It has been very well documented thanks to the efforts of Wilfried Denz, who has the manual version (finess H), and wrote an extensive article about it in HBW nr. 95 in April 2014.
Manufacture was by Heine & Sohn KG in Vörenbach in the black forest, to a design of Gottwill Reinhold, who fell in love with the newfangled plastic materials of the time, and came up with a calculator that mainly consisted of plastic, with just a few metal parts in the way of springs, axles, contacts, and the motor, of course, for the electric version.
The pinwheels are axial pinwheels, with pins that move to the right when they are turned into action, as can be seen in the following pictures:
When the machine arrived into my care from France, it was horribly yellowed, a process that is due to the bromine-containing flame retardants in the plastic, which I suspect to be PVC.
I treated it to a peroxide hair-bleaching treatment, that did wonders for the light grey plastic, but despite my efforts not to get it onto the dark grey, this unfortunately failed, and there is now a lighter spot on the dark grey. I may paint that at some point.
It even spent some time in a tree, in the sun
The light grey is not perfectly smooth in color, but the aspect of the machine is much, much better than it was before.
The machine also needed a serious clean, but turned out to work perfectly fine.
Setting is done in the way of the Orga, with sliders on the top cover, that, via an intermediate gear, slide a toothed rack on the bottom, that engage with the setting gear wheel of the axial pinwheel.
Activating the machine then slides the pinwheel cylinder to the right, out of engagement with the setting sliders, and into the correct position for interacting with the result and counter register.
There are two buttons on the right - one for addition and multiplication. The multiplication works in conjunction with the slider all the way on the left, which has its own pinwheel to set - on “0”, no teeth are set, and the counter does not operate. On “X”, one tooth is set and the counter counts the number of positive revolutions. In the “:” position, nine teeth are set, and when then pressing the second division button (which also works for subtraction), as the machine rotates in the opposite direction, 9 is subtracted from the total everytime, which amounts also to the counter counting positively (as this part of the register doesn’t have tens’ carry).
All in all, it is amazing that an electric calculator can be made entirely from plastic, and so cheaply too. Hats off to Mr. Reinhold!
Some pretty pictures:
Here is a demo video:
And finally - some promotion material, and the 4 page manual.
and a warning about deblocking the machine before use.
