Recently, I came across an old fortune telling machines. You put a quarter in, and out pops your fortune. I was struck by the device’s intricate antique detail. I was also intrigued by the idea that this mere machine, with gears and cogs was somehow supposed to be able to tell me my future. How could a gadget possibly know my life’s destiny? Of course, it can’t. Like the fortune cookie or the Magic 8 Ball,these things are meant solely for entertainment.

Yet, they still hold power over us. For some people a Ouija board or a deck of tarot cards can be the couriers of life changing information. The thing that makes these items magical can be found in their mythos …not in just how they are made or their graphic design, but in their entire idea.

I began to wonder if there are other objects that somehow provide knowledge through purely mechanical means. The slide ruler, the abacus, leapt to mind. These devices also convey complicated ideas through the simple arrangement of moving parts yet their power is not questioned. All of ancient China after all was controlled by sliding beads on an abacus.

Like the fortune telling machine at the fair, these tools of science were often also beautiful, delicately carved with inlaid brass and ivory. Although these mechanisms were based on math, for some, they too possess mystifying and arcane knowledge. They have their own mythos. The slide ruler took us to the moon.

So here I explore a new mythos. What if science made devices that could calculate more than just numbers? What if engineers and mathematicians could come up with formulas and conversion wheels that could tell us who to love or the nature of the soul? What might it look like if all the mysteries of the world could be quantified, laid out in charts, then formatted into easy to use slide wheels? What if there was a company that had been creating just such devices for decades? This is  how I came up with the fictitious company of "Fastidious & Wryte" and their fantastic and never wrong Comp-A-laters.