MECHANICAL AGE

Southland Times, Issue 21198, 26 September 1930, Page 4

MECHANICAL AGE

MODERN OFFICE APPLIANCES. AN INSTRUCTIVE ADDRESS. The second address of the series of lectures by qualified men to the Invercargill business fraternity on subjects of every day interest in the commercial world was given in the Y.M.C.A. last evening, when Mr D. J. Wesney, chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, presided over a larj;e attendance. The chairman, in introducing the lecturer for the evening,-Mr E. A. Wallace, of Wellington, New Zealand manager of Messrs Burroughs Limited, expressed appreciation of the visitor’s consenting to make the trip to address the business men on “Office Mechanical Appliances,” which seemed destined to play such an important role in the administration of any commercial office. ■ Mr Wallace first traced the early history of figures, explaining that the human hand was the original adding machine. Children learnt to count on their fingers in ancient times just as was the case to-day. It was the use of two hands with the ten fingers that developed the present decimal system. The early Greeks made their calculations by moving stones along lines drawn in the dust with a stick. Continuing, Mr Wallace traced the early history of adding machines. The credit for the first attempt to produce a calculating machine along modern lines belonged to an Englishman named Babbage. This was in 1523. The incomplete model of his machine was now in the British Museum. It. was not until 1888 that William S. Burroughs secured the first patent for a key-set recording and adding machine. Office organization was dealt with exhaustively, the speaker emphasizing that the present day office was more and more being recognized as the brain centre of any business. The principles of efficiency that had been adopted with such marked success in the production of goods were just as applicable to the work of the office as they were to that of the factory. The advantages accruing from modern office organization and mechanical accounting could not be over-estimated, said the speaker. Mr Wallace then demonstrated several of the latest mechanical machines in a mostinstructive manner. The first was the Burroughs automatic book-keeping machine used for posting letters and making out statements in one and the same operation. The manner in which this machine automatically wrote the dates wherever required and tabulated to the proper columns (skipping over those for which there was no entry) showed that some remarkable brains were behind the wonderful mechanism. Another feature which attracted much interest was a model in which the items were repeated on to the statements automatically although they were only written on the machine once for the ledger entries. This was done without any carbon paper and the statement and ledger were therefore both original copies. The next model was the typewriter accounting machine. Like the ordinary book-keeping machine this was also operated electrically and could be used as an ordinary adding machine. It was a combination of the standard typewriter and the book-keeping machine, the typewriter portion permitting any detail to be written, while the bookkeeping section supplied all the figure work. In addition to demonstrating other machines used in accountancy, Mr Wallace manipulated a small electric calculator, which he said was described by a business man as “the Burroughs ugly duckling" for it was certainly going to prove to be above all others. Every key on this machine had a separate electrical connection and, faster than the hand could possibly press thekeys, the machine added the figures and made any kind of calculation, whether by way of multiplication, division, finding cube or square roots or addition. At the conclusion of the address a hearty vote of thanks was unanimously accorded Mr Wallace for his instructive address.