Jerry Merryman, one of the three men credited with inventing the hand-held electronic calculator, popularly known as market women calculator in Nigeria, is dead.
TheNewsGuru (TNG) reports Merryman died February 27 from complications of heart and kidney failure at a Dallas hospital aged 86.
According to Kim Ikovic, his stepdaughter, Merryman had been hospitalised since late December after experiencing complications during surgery to install a pacemaker.
Merryman’s team that included James Van Tassel, and led by Jack Kilby, invented the hand-held calculator while working at Dallas-based Texas Instruments.
The team made way for today’s computers with the invention of the integrated circuit, and won the Nobel Prize.
Merryman told NPR’s “All Things Considered” in 2013, “It was late 1965 and Jack Kilby, my boss, presented the idea of a calculator.
“He called some people in his office. 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”.
Merryman was born on June 17, 1932, and grew up in Hearne in Central Texas.
He went to Texas A&M University in College Station but didn’t 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 retired in January 1994, the company said.