Jerry Merryman, an inventor of the handheld calculator, has died at 86

Jerry Merryman, one of three men credited with inventing the handheld calculator, died on Feb. 27 from complications of heart and kidney failure, The Associated Press reports. He was 86.

Between 1965 and a final patent application in 1974, Merryman worked with James Van Tassel under the direction of Jack Kilby (pictured, left) at Texas Instruments to develop the first portable calculator. Kilby won a Nobel Prize in 2000 for inventing the integrated circuit in 1958, paving the way for modern computers. The prototype of their calculator is in the Smithsonian.

Merryman joined Texas Instruments in 1963, at age 30, after a few years at Texas A&M University and various jobs, including measuring hurricane winds on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. "Jerry did the circuit design on this thing in three days, and if he was ever around, he'd lean over and say, 'and nights,'" former TI colleague and friend Ed Millis told AP. Another former colleague, Vernon Porter, called Merryman "absolutely, outstandingly brilliant," adding: "I have a Ph.D. in material science, and I've known hundreds of scientists, professors, Nobel prize-winners, and so on. Jerry Merryman was the most brilliant man that I've ever met. Period."

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Merryman explained the genesis of their calculator to NPR in 2013: "It was late 1965 and Jack Kilby, my boss, presented the idea of a calculator. He called some people in his office. He says, we'd like to have some sort of computing device, perhaps to replace the slide rule. It would be nice if it were as small as this little book that I have in my hand. ... Silly me, I thought we were just making a calculator, but we were creating an electronic revolution." He retired from Texas Instruments in 1994.