A late-nineteenth-century calculating machine entered the office with the confidence of a financial title: the Millionaire. Its name did not promise wealth. It identified Otto Steiger’s mechanical answer to multiplication, patented in the United States in 1895.

Steiger was a Swiss citizen living in Munich. His design could multiply a number directly by a single digit with one turn of a crank. That qualifier matters. It did not swallow any two enormous numbers and reveal their product instantly. Instead, it mechanized one multiplier digit at a time, giving the operator a direct operation where other machines might reach the answer through repeated additions.

Hans W. Egli’s firm manufactured the machine in Zurich. Numbers were entered and read through the controls and windows of a substantial desktop apparatus, while the crank translated the operator’s chosen operation into a sequence of internal mechanical positions. Arithmetic became visible as hardware moving through constrained steps.

The Millionaire’s oddest component may be the nameplate. A modern device would boast about speed or precision. This one adopted the identity of the person its buyers might hope to become. Every turn of the crank made no one richer, but it let a machine perform the repeated labor hidden inside one line of multiplication.