Jerry Merryman, a self-taught electrical engineer who helped design the first pocket calculator, died on Feb. 27 in Dallas. He was 86.
His wife, Phyllis (Lee) Merryman, said the cause was heart and kidney failure. He had been hospitalized since late December for complications arising from surgery to install a pacemaker.
In 1965, two years after he joined the electronics maker Texas Instruments without a college degree, the company asked Mr. Merryman and two other engineers to build a calculator that could fit into a shirt pocket.
Image: Jerry Merryman, right, with a fellow co-inventor of the pocket calculator, Jack Kilby, at the American Computer Museum in Bozeman, Mont., in 1997. The third inventor was James Van Tassel. Mr. Kilby received a Nobel Prize for his work on integrated circuity.CreditCreditPhyllis Merryman, via Associated Press
