I didn’t have time to find out if this calculation story is true, but it might interest people. Maybe someone here knows. 
In the nineteenth century, mathematicians attacked pi with the help of human computers. The most powerful of these was Johann Martin Zacharias Dase, a prodigy from Hamburg. Dase could multiply large numbers in his head, and he made a living exhibiting himself to crowds in Germany, Denmark, and England, and hiring himself out to mathematicians. A mathematician once asked Dase to multiply 79,532,853 by 93,758,479, and Dase gave the right answer in fifty-four seconds. Dase extracted the square root of a hundred-digit number in fifty-two minutes, and he was able to multiply a couple of hundred-digit numbers in his head during a period of eight and three-quarters hours. Dase could do this kind of thing for weeks on end, running as an unattended supercomputer. He would break off a calculation at bedtime, store everything in his memory for the night, and resume calculation in the morning. Occasionally, Dase had a system crash. In 1845, he bombed while trying to demonstrate his powers to a mathematician and astronomer named Heinrich Christian Schumacher, reckoning wrongly every multiplication that he attempted. He explained to Schumacher that he had a headache. Schumacher also noted that Dase did not in the least understand theoretical mathematics. A mathematician named Julius Petersen once tried in vain for six weeks to teach Dase the rudiments of Euclidean geometry, but they absolutely baffled Dase. Large numbers Dase could handle, and in 1844 L. K. Schulz von Strassnitsky hired him to compute pi. Dase ran the job for almost two months in his brain, and at the end of the time he wrote down pi correctly to the first two hundred decimal places— then a world record.