Technologies of intelligence

Technologies of intelligence are the machines that mechanised intellectual work before the computer: mechanical calculators, which perform arithmetic, and typewriters, which make writing fast, legible and reproducible.

They are the ancestors of artificial intelligence, because for the first time they hand part of office thinking over to a mechanism.

Between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War these machines entered the offices of banks, industry and public administration:

• the pinwheel calculator sets each digit by raising from zero to nine pins on a disc; turning the crank, the pins advance the register. According to John Wolff, every machine of this kind derives from Willgodt Theophil Odhner's designs of the 1870s and 1880s, which gave rise to the Original-Odhner family in Russia and later Sweden, and to Brunsviga in Braunschweig, Germany;
• the typewriter brought mechanical writing into the office; in Italy it was made from 1908 by Olivetti in Ivrea, founded by Camillo Olivetti and later led by his son Adriano Olivetti.

Enrico Giubertoni is a passionate collector of technologies of intelligence, which he restores following the conservative approach of Cesare Brandi: minimal intervention, reversible materials, and the marks of time kept as part of the object's history.

Source: John Wolff, Original-Odhner Technical Description, per le macchine a ruota a pioli; Cesare Brandi, Teoria del restauro, 1963, per il restauro conservativo.

Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com

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