Matridigm Big Lie #1: Franklin Chiang
I decided to do a little more digging into the claims made by Dave Stewart and Emerald Research. One of the hype nuggets they seem to be touting is the "brilliance" of Franklin Chiang.
Personally, I have never heard of the guy, but I wanted to give him every benefit of the doubt. I found an interesting gentleman named Wlodek Mier-Jedrzejowicz who has written a history about HP handheld calculators. I wrote him a letter asking about Franklin Chiang and he doesn't seem to know who he is either. Also...David Stewart claims Mr. Chiang single-handedly invented the calculator in the 1960's, when in fact, it wasn't introduced until 1972.
Dr. Mier-Jedrzejowicz has written several books about calculators and is considered an expert on HP calculators. The history of the HP-35 is covered in the following book:
"A Guide to HP Handheld Calculators and Computers," by Wlodek Mier-Jedrzejowicz, Ph.D., available from Wilson/Barnett Publishing, P.O. Box 345, Tustin, CA 92781, USA
Here is Dr. Mier-Jedrzejowicz's response to my query about Franklin Chiang:
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I'm very sorry, I don't know anything about Franklin Chiang. I'll be
happy to look for his name in what documentation I have from the early days of the HP-35 and let you know - but that might take a week or 2.
So far as the "invention" of the HP-35 goes, the story is that Bill
Hewlett asked his engineers to design a "shirt-pocket" version of
the HP9100 desktop calculator, and a team of engineers, with Hewlett's active co-operation, designed and built the HP-35. F.Chiang might have been one of the members of this team, but to to say that any one member of the team "invented" the HP-35 would be going too far.
Regards,
Wlodek Mier-Jedrzejowicz |
