MARVELLOUS MECHANISM.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 65, 31 October 1911, Page 7

MARVELLOUS MECHANISM.

The increasing use of calculating machines in big business houses is the subject of an interesting article in an American paper. The work of thousands of clerks has been taken over small machines like typewriters fu appearance, by which columns of money can lie added up with none of the risk of error to which every clerk is liable. It is a smart cleric who can add up two columns of dollars and cents in one process, but the adding machines does this rapidly and accurately. But such machines as these arc simple compared with others that have come on the market lately. There are machines that calculate to fifteen places of decimals. A compact little affair, resembling a music-box, the invention of a German, may he made to perform very rapidly tiio most portentous sums in addition, substruction, multiplication by one or two factors, division, squaring and cubing. It is required, for instance, to multiply 531,975 by 92-1. The first number is set out by touching little knobs representing 531,975. To multiply by the other number you turn a handle four times, push along a slide one place and turn the handle twice, then push the slide another place onward and turn the handle nine times. The long multiplication is done without the possibility of error, and the dial shows 491,5-11,900. In the same mechanical way may be done other arithmetical processes. One of the latest contrivances to be put on the market is one that at once shows shopman and customer the correct charge. For instance, suppose the customer is buying meat at 11 cents a pound.. The pointer is pxit to that figure, and when two pounds seven ounces of the meat is put into the scale, an indicator on the dial at once shows the amount of money due. We are reminded, however, that marvellously ingenious as some of these machines are, it is only mechanism., and not intelligence, that is being p ,’dvcd.