The first pinwheel calculator was designed by W.T. Odhner in Saint Petersburg in 1886. After the Revolution of 1917, the USSR government nationalized the invention. The Soviets kept on manufacturing Odhner aritmomethers (calculators) under the ‘Iron Felix’ name after a famous and dark character: Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky founded the Soviet calculator factory in Moscow in 1924, and was also the founder of the famous Cheka (Bolshevik secret police). He was sadly notorious for his hardness and was awarded the nickname ‘Iron Felix’, just like the calculator, among his own colleagues. Odhner’s original design (nationalized in 1924) was used by Dzerzhinsky for his Felix calculators. While in the rest of Europe arithmometers were becoming obsolete, Felix calculators kept on being manufactured in the Soviet Union until 1978.
