William S Burroughs Adding Machine
Marie Ota
Burroughs was the son of a mechanic and worked with machines throughout his childhood. While a small boy, his parents moved to Auburn, New York, where he and his brothers were educated in public schools.
In 1875, he started working as a bank clerk. Much of his job consisted of laboriously reviewing ledgers for errors.[1] Burroughs then became interested in developing an adding machine. At the bank, there had been a number of prototypes, but in inexperienced hands, they would sometimes give incorrect answers. Burroughs' did not find his clerical work agreeable, as he was fond of mechanics. He resigned after seven years working as a clerk
In the early 1880s, Burroughs was advised by a doctor to move to an area with a warmer climate. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri where he worked in the Boyer Machine Shop. These new surroundings hastened the development of an existing idea: an adding machine. His new job gave him the opportunity to build his prototype. Accuracy was the foundation of his work. He made his design drawings on metal plates to prevent distortion.
Burroughs filed his first patent for the invention of a "calculating machine" in 1885. It was designed to ease the monotony of clerical arithmetic. By 1890, they were well known in the banking industry, and adoption spread.[3]
He was awarded the Franklin Institute's John Scott Legacy Medal shortly before his death.[1] He was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.[2] He was the grandfather of Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs and great-grandfather of William S. Burroughs Jr., who was also a writer.
William Seward Burroughs invented the first practical adding and listing machine. Born in Rochester, New York, Burroughs began his career as a bank clerk. Working in a bank inspired the young inventor with a vision of a mechanical device that would relieve accountants and bookkeepers of the monotony of their tasks and ensure that a smaller percentage of their time was spent correcting errors.
Burroughs began work on his mechanical accounting device shortly after moving to St. Louis in 1882. A machine shop owner gave him a work space and provided him with a young assistant, Alfred Doughty, later president of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. Burroughs received a patent in 1888 for his "Calculating Machine." Burroughs and several St. Louis businessmen formed the American Arithometer Co. to market the machine. The calculating machine, however, proved to be inaccurate in everyday use, so Burroughs received a patent in 1893 for an improved calculating machine.
Burroughs retired from his company in 1897 due to poor health and moved to Citronelle, Alabama. By 1898 more than 1,000 machines had been sold, and by 1926 the company, renamed the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, had produced a million machines.
Before 1888, you did it by mind, hand and pencil, no matter how many numbers contributed to the sum. That changed with the introduction of the Burroughs Registering Accountant. The machine that, "... saves brains and time, and is three times as rapid as the old way," revolutionized the way entire industries and governments dealt with number sets. It made the adding machine a staple of the office for more than a century..
On June 25, 2007, The Franklin Institute Science Museum welcomed a Burroughs Registering Accountant into its collection. This kind of machine is not unfamiliar to the Institute. Its inventor, William Seward Burroughs, was awarded The Scott Medal in 1897 from the Institute for the combination of calculator and printer. The fully mechanical machine performs only one mathematical function: addition.
When a twenty-five-year-old Burroughs became frustrated with the time involved in adding numbers as a bank clerk in 1882, he set out to speed up the process mechanically. Patent application was made in 1885 and major production started in 1888.
"I have been using for months the 'Burroughs Registering Accountant,' and after testing its merits and efficiency cannot see how anyone desiring accuracy coupled with expediency, can do without such a machine."
With the adding of the machine to offices came some criticism. Inexperienced users would mishandle the operating lever then complain of inaccurate results. Burroughs yielded a solution to that problem in the form of an "oil-filled dashpot," which took him seventy-two sleepless hours to concoct. It smoothed the operation of the machine, despite any mishandling by the user.
When improved Registering Accountants left the workshop in 1891, Burroughs celebrated by proclaiming, "I have ended the last of my troubles," as he threw faulty machines from a store room window, watching them smash to the ground.
Tammy Werner of Unisys hands the Deed of Gift Agreement to John Alviti, Senior Curator at The Franklin Institute. The machine is given by Gail A. Arrington, on behalf of Unisys Corporation, in memory of Joseph H. Arrington.
This particular machine, Style No. 3, serial number 39833 was obviously a functioning adding machine at one time. It was on display in a Unisys lobby for several years before more current, future-facing technologies took its place. One can only wonder how many times the lever was pulled.
Who was William S. Burroughs? What was the Burroughs Registering Accountant? How did the American Arithmometer Company begin? What is the legacy of Burroughs, his science, and his rewards? Would you have purchased an Arithmometer? The Burroughs sales team would have tried to persuade you with their sales brochure.
William S. Burroughs was born on January 28, 1857 in the state of New York. He married Ida Selover in 1879, with whom he would have four children: Jennie, Horace, Mortimer, and Helen. In 1882, he was twenty-five and living with his family in the city of Auburn, NY. As a bank clerk, he was troubled by the long hours he spent pouring over bank ledgers in search of errors, and the equally long hours he devoted to guarding against such errors. He was convinced that many other clerks and bookkeepers must encounter the same difficulty. So, he started thinking about how the problem might be solved. In the meantime, Burroughs' failing health prompted his doctors to order him to find a warmer climate and a more active occupation. He obligingly moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, and took up engineering. His newly-acquired technical know-how, combined with his familiarity with banks and balance sheets, gave him the ability to produce the first office adding machine.
Burroughs was indeed capable of dreaming up an efficient adding machine. But he lacked one element necessary to turn his dream into a reality: money. He happened upon a financial source in 1884, when he was sent on a mechanical job to a local store in Saint Louis. He mentioned his plans for an adding machine to one of the store's employees, and the staff member was so enthused at the prospect of such an invention that he pronounced himself willing to invest in the idea. Moreover, he persuaded his friends to invest as well.
With the money he received from these men, Burroughs rented a few feet of bench space in a small, single-story brick workshop from a proprietor named Joseph Boyer. His chief assistance came from a young man who introduced himself as Alfred Doughty. By the time he got to working in this shop, Burroughs had amassed a capital of roughly $300.00, which he repaid with promised shares in the adding machine company he hoped to build.
In 1897, The Franklin Institute presented its John Scott Legacy Medal to William S. Burroughs "for the ingenuity displayed in successfully combining a calculating machine with a printer so as to obtain a printed record of the operation of the machine."
The award-winning Burroughs Registering Accountant was an early model of what is today known as a calculator. This machine performed one simple function: addition. As a young inventor, Burroughs had realized that America was experiencing a rapid growth of industry and technology and had known there was a need for a machine that could add numbers quickly and accurately.
He was not the first to conceive of a device that would aid its user with the process of adding long columns of numbers: several of his contemporaries were working on ways to mechanize the process in 19th Century America. However, he was the first to transform current principles into a key-set, crank-operated adding-listing machine. He sat down to construct such a machine in 1884, unaware of the far-reaching effects his adding machine would have on America and the world.
The Burroughs Registering Accountant was able to function largely because of a mechanism known as a pivoting sector. This pivoting sector was fundamental to the invention, crucial because it smoothed the process of carrying a 1. This mathematical procedure had previously posed a problem to other inventors of calculating machines. Below is an animation detailed the mechanism. Descriptions of each numbered process are provided.
1. The other end of the pivoting sector (b) is equipped with typefaces, which correspond to the keys in the column under which the sector is operating.
2. When the movement of the sector (b) is halted by the wire (e), the typeface which corresponds to key (a) is opposite the printing space. In this case, it is typeface 6.
3. At the end of the handle's forward stroke the printing of the sum entered in step 1 takes place.
1. When the bank clerk pulled the machine's handle at the beginning of the operation, he caused a pinion bar to withdraw and take the recording pinion (g) out of gear with the rack (d), mentioned in step 4 of the "Forward Stroke" process.
2. The bank clerk now begins to return the operating lever to its original position, throwing the recording pinion (g) into gear with the rack (d).
3. As the rack (d) returns to its starting position, the recording pinion turns through just six spaces (in this case, it turns through 6 spaces because, as you remember from step 2 in the "Pivoting Sector" section above, the bank clerk initially pressed down on key number 6).