A Brief History
On August 21, 1888, American inventor William Seward Burroughs of New York patented the first successful American adding machine, a device that remained in service until superseded by electronic calculators in the 1970s. While mechanical adding machines date back long before that of Burroughs’s, his machine was definitely an improvement and was made to even print results.
Digging Deeper
Other old fashioned tech that also worked rather well is the slide rule, a computing device that could perform all sorts of mathematical operations almost as quickly as an electronic calculator. Invented in the 1600s by William Oughtred, the slide rule was perfected in the 1800s for use by artillerymen.
Even before the slide rule came the abacus, a mechanical counting aid that dates back to perhaps 2700 BC! Spread across the ancient world from the Middle East, the abacus was used for many centuries, especially in the Far East where it is still used today!
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: What old technology do you miss?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Mims, Forrest. Number Machines: An Introduction to the Abacus, Slide Rule and Pocket Calculator. David McKay Co, 1977.
Sarswat, Rajesh. Be a Human Calculator: Mere Observation – No Magic. Notion Press, 2016.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by trekphiler of an 1890s Burroughs adding machine, shot at Western Development Museum, Saskatoon, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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