Co-inventor of the pocket calculator
Born: June 17, 1932;
Died: February 27, 2019
JERRY Merryman, who has died aged 86, was the co-inventor of the hand-held electronic calculator. He was one of the three men credited with inventing the hand-held device while working at Dallas-based Texas Instruments.
The team was led by Jack Kilby, who paved the way for today's computers with the invention of the integrated circuit and won the Nobel Prize.
The prototype built by the team, which also included James Van Tassel, is at the Smithsonian Institution.
"I have a PhD in material science and I've known hundreds of scientists, professors, Nobel prize-winners and so on. Jerry Merryman was the most brilliant man that I've ever met. Period," said Vernon Porter, a former Texas Instruments colleague and friend. "Absolutely, outstandingly brilliant. He had an incredible memory and he had an ability to pull up formulas, information, on almost any subject."
Merryman showed great ability as a scientist and engineer from a young age and started repairing radios when he was just 11 years old. Later, he also worked for the railroad in Texas repairing rail cars and worked at a radio station as chief engineer. He went on to Texas A&M University in College Station but did not finish.
His jobs after that included working at the university's department of oceanography and meteorology and before long he was on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico measuring the force of hurricane winds. He started at Texas Instruments in 1963, at the age of 30 and Merryman remembered that the idea of a calculator was first brought up by Jack Kilby in 1965.
"He called some people in his office," said Merryman in 2013. "He says, we'd like to have some sort of computing device, perhaps to replace the slide rule. It would be nice if it were as small as this little book that I have in my hand."
Merryman added, "Silly me, I thought we were just making a calculator, but we were creating an electronic revolution."
The Smithsonian says that the three had made enough progress by September 1967 to apply for a patent. The result was described in U.S. Patent 3,819,921 as “Miniature Electronic Calculator,” and was filed by Texas Instruments on September 29, 1967, and issued on June 5, 1974.
Merryman, who was born on June 17, 1932, grew up in Hearne in Central Texas. By the age of 11 he had become the radio repairman for the town.
"He'd scrape together a few cents to go to the movies in the afternoons and evenings and the police would come get him out because their radios would break and he had to fix them," said Merryman's wife, Phyllis Merryman.
His friends and family said he was always creating something. For example, his daughter Melissa Merryman recalled him making his own tuning fork for their piano. She said she asked him how he made it out of that "hunk of metal" and he told her: "It was easy, I just took away all the parts that were not an F sharp."
Friend and former Texas colleague Gaynel Lockhart remembers a telescope in concrete at Merryman's home with a motor attached that would allow it to follow a planet throughout the night.
Despite his accomplishments, he was humble. "He wouldn't ever boast or brag about himself, not ever," said Melissa Merryman.
Former colleague Ed Millis said Merryman was one of the most talented, versatile, and entertaining people he had ever met, and that he had successfully erased the boundary between work and play. Without fail, he was engrossed in at least one interesting project, whether it be the moon’s tidal effect on his backyard, or chasing a leaky water pipe in his house. Merryman, said Millis, understood the science of everything, and wasn't afraid to use it.
"In college, he was a proven master of the slip-stick, and later went on in his professional life to render our favourite mathematical instrument obsolete," said Millis. "But we all know the slide rule lives on—in our hearts it will never be replaced by a $2.99 plastic box, no matter how many decimals it has. "
Jerry Merryman retired from Texas Instruments in January 1994. "He always said that he didn't care anything about being famous, if his friends thought he did a good job, he was happy," Phyllis Merryman said.
Merryman died on February 27 at a Dallas hospital from complications of heart and kidney failure, said his stepdaughter, Kim Ikovic.
She said he had been in hospital since late December after experiencing complications during surgery to install a pacemaker.
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