Burroughs adding machine
More info
- Creator
- William Seward Burroughs
- Released
- 1885 (filed), 1888 (granted)
- Type
- Key-driven adding machine with printed output
- Successor
- Burroughs Corporation, later Unisys
The first calculating machine that printed what it had done — and therefore the first a bank was willing to trust.
William Seward Burroughs was a bank clerk in Auburn, New York, and he hated the work: columns of figures to be added by hand and made to balance to the cent. He filed a patent for a key-driven adding machine in 1885 and founded the American Arithmometer Company in St. Louis the following year. The patent was granted in 1888.
The first fifty machines were useless. The result depended on how hard the operator yanked the handle, and only the inventor had the knack. Burroughs is said to have thrown the entire batch out of a window. The fix arrived in 1893: a hydraulic dashpot that made the result independent of how the handle was pulled — much the same mechanism as a door closer.
What sold the machine was the printing. It struck every entered figure and the total onto a paper tape, so an auditor could retrace the arithmetic afterwards. Burroughs died of tuberculosis in 1898 at 41, just before sales took off; by 1913 the company had sold 100,000 machines. It became the Burroughs Corporation, a major mainframe builder, and merged with Sperry in 1986 to form Unisys. The inventor's grandson shared his name and wrote Naked Lunch.