Background
A company biography of Carl Friden (document identity long lost) from the 1960s or before stated that he was born Carl Bengtsson, and said it was the Swedish custom at the time to assume a new surname (instead of the patronymic, apparently). He chose "Fridén" as his surname. Friden employees were told that his adopted name means "Peace" in Swedish, however, the correct Swedish translation of Friden (without the acute accent on the letter "e"), would be "the Peace". A different biography, apparently written by his family, makes no mention of this.
Carl M. Friden had been a mechanical engineer representing the Swedish Match Trust. In 1913, Friden traveled to in London, England to assemble match machines for his company. In 1914, he traveled to Australia with the same purpose in mind, but was stranded there when World War I broke out. In the interim he worked on his ideas for designing a more reliable calculator. Two years later he headed to San Francisco on an American steamer to get part way home, but that is where he stayed. He found his place in the Marchant Calculating Machine Co. of Oakland within a year. When the U.S. Government made Marchant discontinue its current model because it violated some German patents, Carl Friden filled the void with his own model.
Friden became the chief designer of the Marchant Calculating Machine Company. While there he introduced his new design which reduced the number of calculator parts by one-third, thus increasing their reliability. Friden continued to develop the modified-pinwheel machines at Marchant during the 1920s. His machines were robust and quickly became popular.
When he started his own company, his early calculators were marked "Fridén", with the accent.
Read more about this topic: Carl Friden
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