With the appearance of the first tabulator, the typewriter began to invade new fields which hitherto had been entirely beyond its reach. In some of the Old World countries the decimal tabulator actually took the lead in blazing a path for the writing machine. In these countries there survived for many years a certain prejudice against the typewritten letter, but this prejudice did not extend to form and tabular work, and the first machines purchased by countless business houses in England, France, Italy and elsewhere were tabulating typewriters. This seems like a reversal of the natural order, but the final result was the same. The typewriter, once introduced, soon came into use for every kind of writing.
The decimal tabulator is a notable example of how one idea leads to another. During the years immediately preceding its appearance there had been happenings in other branches of the office appliance field. The idea of clerical labor saving, embodied in the first typewriter, had given birth to a varied industry, and among other new inventions, had produced the adding machine. The first adding machines, however, carried no printing mechanism, and so long as typewriters were also lacking in a tabulating mechanism, the fields of the two machines lay entirely apart. In the early nineties, however, the Burroughs machine, which listed figures in a column as added, began to find a market. Soon after came the first tabulating typewriter, and it was soon recognized that each of these machines represented a partial approach to the field of the other. The question then arose: “Since the typewriter now writes figures in columns, why not build one that will add these columns as written? In other words, why not build an adding typewriter?” In due time the adding typewriter came, to be followed later by the typewriter-accounting or bookkeeping machine.
Prominent among machines of this type are the Elliott-Fisher, which has a flat writing bed or platen, the Remington, which introduced the feature of automatic subtraction, and the Underwood, which is electrically operated. The earlier adding typewriters added in vertical columns only, but soon a cross-adding mechanism was added, and the two acts of vertical and cross computation are performed in one operation.
Elliot-Fisher
Remington
Underwood
TYPES OF PRESENT DAY TYPEWRITER-ACCOUNTING MACHINES