COUNTING BY MACHINE.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 275, 13 August 1908, Page 8

COUNTING BY MACHINE.

NOVEL EXPERIMENT AT THE BANK OF ENGLAND. In the counting-house of the Bank of England a remarkable counting machine has just been installed for experimental purposes. The invention of a Swedish engineer, tho apparatus counts and sorts money into paper tubes or bags at the rato of 72,000 coins an hour. Fourteen expert cashiers in tho Bank of England, working all day long, are only able to count £10,000 worth of silver coins. Tho new machine is expected to do so in a fifth of tho time.

Worked by electricity, the apparatus sets about its task in a fascinating way. An assistant first pours a ■ great bag of mixed coins into a receptacle at the rear of the machine; and tho operator takes his stand-in front of it. A movement of a lever brings up a heaped trayful of several hundred coins, which aro tipped over by a rapid mechanical action. They fall with a musical jinglo upon a polished metal plate.

This is tilted downwatds at one end, and broken up, by raised metal rules, into exactly a hundred squares, which may be so altered in size that any desired coin,, slipping into them, is held firmly in its place. As tho coins fall upon the plate, mechanism hidden beneath it causes it to movo rapidly to and fro with a sievelike motion. Tho result is that, should it bo desired to abstract sixpences from a heap of larger money, all the bigger coins which fall upon tho moving plato aro in the spaoe of a few sc-conds "sifted''- off it to return to their original receptacle, while in each of the hundred squares lies a sixponny-piece. By' mcchanism even moro ingenious the hundred coins which have been caught on tho plato travel through metal channels into paper tubes, and are stacked without tho ohaiice of error in twenties, forties, or sixties.

An 'Over-Seas Daily Mail" representative witnessed a contest between this machine and an expert cashier. In tho magazino of tho machine were poured nearly 1000 pennies, while beforo tho cashier, who sat at a table, was a large bag of similar coins. At a given signal tho machino and the man began to count out 400 pennies. In twenty seconds from the start an electric bell- at tho sido of tho apparatus rang softly. Tho 400 coins had been counted out into twenty neat tubes, each containing twenty coins, whilo tho cashier, labouring heroically, had sorted exactly eighth-one jxmnies.