Mr. Babbage, in 1822, entered upon the task of superintending the construction of a machine for calculating and printing mathematical and astronomical tables. He began by building a model, which produced forty-four figures per minute. The next year the Royal Society reported upon the invention, which appeared so promising that the Lords of the Treasury voted Mr. Babbage £1,500 to help him perfect his apparatus.
He looked about for a first-rate mechanician of high intelligence as well as of extreme manual skill. The man he wanted appeared in Mr. Joseph Clement, who had already made his name as the inventor of a drawing instrument, a self-acting lathe, a self-centring chuck, and fluted taps and dies. Mr. Clement soon produced special tools for shaping the various parts of the machine. So elaborate was the latter, that, according to Dr. Smiles, "the drawings for the calculating machinery alone—not to mention the printing machinery, which was almost equally elaborate—covered not less than four hundred square feet of surface!"
You will easily imagine, especially if you have ever had a special piece of apparatus made for you by a mechanic, that the bills mounted up at an alarming rate; so fast, indeed, that the Government began to ask, Why this great expense, and so little visible result? After seven years' work the engineers' account had reached £7,200, and Mr. Babbage had disbursed an additional £7,000 out of his own pocket. Mr. Clement quarrelled with his employer—possibly because he harboured suspicions that they were both off on a wild-goose chase—and withdrew, taking all his valuable tools with him. The Government soon followed his example, and poor Babbage was left with his half-finished invention, "a beautiful fragment of a great work." It had been designed to calculate as far as twenty figures, but was completed only sufficiently to go to five figures. In 1862 it occupied a prominent place among the mechanical exhibits at the Great Exhibition.
A MECHANICAL CASHIER
The printing apparatus of a National Cash Register. It impresses on a paper strip the amount and nature of every money transaction; and also prints a date, number, advertisement, money value, and nature of business done on a ticket for the customer.
We learn, with some satisfaction, that all this effort was not fated to be fruitless. Two scientists of Stockholm—Scheutz by name—were so impressed by Dr. Lardner's account of this calculating machine that they carried Babbage's scheme through, and after twenty years of hard work completed a machine which seemed to be almost capable of thinking. The English Government spent £1,200 on a copy, which at Somerset House entered upon the routine duty of working out annuity and other tables for the Registrar-General.
From Babbage's wonderfully and fearfully made machine we pass to a calculator which to-day may be seen at work in hundreds of thousands of shops and offices.
It is the most modern substitute for the open till; and, by the aid of marvellous interior works, acts as account-keeper and general detective to the money transactions of the establishment in which it is employed.
There are very many types of Cash Register, and as it would be impossible to enumerate them all, we will pass at once to the most perfect type of all, known to the makers and vendors as "Number 95."