Fortunately, after the restoration, I found an old fellow that still sold some copies of the manuals. There was just about nothing available on the net when I started repairing my Friden. That I did not have documentation did not help either, but I have still found some, scanned it and also made it available below. But I revived it bit by bit progressively. Then some adjustments were completely off. The restoration was very arduous: most of my machine was frozen solid, necessitating finding the faults one by one and unlocking things manually using a combination of cunning and forceful persuasion (read: hammer and pliers). Although it was in good shape cosmetically, it was in horrible shape mechanically.
I bought my Friden STW 10 on eBay and it arrived intact (a rare thing for such heavy items packed from eBay). Unfortunately, after a long successful and inventive stretch under its visionary founder, it all went downhill fast when it was purchased in 1965 by the German company Singer, which was unable to capitalize on Friden's early lead in electronic calculators. The Friden company was founded in 1934 during the great depression by Swedish immigrant Carl Friden, and operated near San Francisco in San Leandro, California. The last mechanical model, the SRW 10, had a square root function! Finally, in 1962, Friden introduced one of the earliest transistorized electronic calculators, the EC-130, and then in 1964 the EC-132 which added a square root function. The later ones, like my 1956 STW 10, were electrically driven and featured multiplication and division. The early ones like the 1941 Friden H8 (see video below) featured only additions and subtraction and were manually actuated. They were impressively large and fast, and built like tanks.
FRIDEN CALCULATOR VALUE PROFESSIONAL
The Friden calculators were very popular professional calculators in the US in the 1940's and 1950's.
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