OFFICE ROBOTS

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 124, 21 November 1935, Page 31

OFFICE ROBOTS

ADVANCES OF TODAY Viscount Leverhulme, opening the twenty-fifth Business Efficiency Exhibition at the White City recently, remarked that it was not only an exhibition of efficiency, but that phenomenon —an efficient exhibition, says the "Daily Telegraph." All the office robots of today were clicking and buzzing away. There were the machines that record each business conversation, add up long columns of figures, send out circulars, and even lick the stamps for the office boy. Wise and clever men have been busier than ever before at making offices easier places to work in and abolishing the old pen-and-ink drudgery. The exhibition eliminated the "tired business man."

One calculating machine,, it was averred, "would accumulate totals up to £9,999,999 19s lid." We may only hope that its owner is able to run it full out!

Here are some of the aids to big busii.ess that were to be seen:— An apparatus which signs 3000 cheques an hour. A cash register that can keep the books of a big hotel, register every item in a customer's account, and receipt the bill. Loud (but not too loud) speakers for the manager's desk. Microphones which enable him to talk to any member of his staff from any point in his office. Flashing signals to warn secretaries that the principal cannot „ee a visitor or that he has a visitor he would like tactfully repulsed.

Instruments which can be hitched to a telephone and transmit a message spoken hours or days earlier. As Lord Leverhulme pointed out, times of depression, now fortunately less apparent, have fostered the increased use of devices which speed up business transactions. By way of paradox, these labour-saving devices increase employment.