Casio's calculator empire was funded by a ring that held cigarettes
Before Casio built calculators it sold the yubiwa pipe, a finger ring fitted with a cigarette holder. Earnings from Toshio Kashio's odd invention helped fund the four brothers' first calculating machine, a 1957 relay model that launched a company now best known for watches.
Tadao Kashio opened a small workshop in Mitaka, Tokyo, in April 1946, making gears and microscope parts. A 1949 business show, where the brothers saw electric calculators, set them on a new path. Their first prototype used solenoids; to make it easier to mass-produce, they rebuilt it around telephone-exchange relays. The result, the 14-A of June 1957, packed 341 relays, handled 14-digit numbers, and swapped the bulky full keyboards of rivals for a simple ten-key pad with a single display window. Casio Computer was founded to make it on 1 June 1957, with the brothers' father as president.
Personal machines came next. The pocket Casio Mini of 1972 cost a third as much as competitors and sold a million units in ten months, and the series eventually passed ten million. Watches began with the Casiotron in 1974, whose calendar knew the length of each month. In 1981 engineer Kikuo Ibe proposed a watch that could survive a ten-metre drop, run ten years on a battery and resist ten bar of water pressure; the first G-Shock followed in 1983.
Music came too. The Casiotone 201 of 1980 offered 29 preset sounds, and a rhythm programmed by Hiroko Okuda for the little MT-40 became the backbone of Wayne Smith's 1985 hit Under Mi Sleng Teng and of much digital dancehall. The QV-10 of 1995 was the first consumer digital camera with a screen for framing and reviewing shots.
Not everything lasted. Casio quit page printers in 2016 and compact cameras in 2018, and paid a £3.7 million UK fine in 2019 over minimum online pricing. Timepieces now bring in about two-thirds of its sales, some ¥185 billion of ¥276 billion in the year to March 2026.
Source: Casio
