The accounting machine completed the application of the typewriter to every form of business writing, including combined writing and adding. In the latter field the advantages it offers are those of the typewriter intensified. The combination of two tasks—writing and adding—in one, eliminates the separate adding and the separate adding cost. A further advantage is the error-proofing of every task, the machine furnishing its own checks against possible mistakes by the operator. To the business man these advantages are decisive. The typewritten bill is now about as universal as the typewritten letter, so also is the typewritten statement, and the old-fashioned bound and pen-written ledgers are fast giving place to the modern card ledger, kept on the bookkeeping machine. The same applies to every conceivable kind of combined typing and adding in every line of business. The pen has not entirely disappeared from these fields as yet, but it is going, and its final departure is as clearly indicated as anything in the book of fate.
Remington
Corona
Underwood
TYPES OF PRESENT DAY PORTABLE MACHINES
While the typewriter has been completing its conquest of the entire field of business writing, there has been another development at what we may call the opposite end of the scale. The machine is now demonstrating its time-saving utility not alone for business writing but for all writing. The use of the machine for every kind of personal writing was clearly forecast by its original builders, as the first typewriter catalogue plainly proves. Indeed this was clearer to them than the general business uses. Many years were to elapse, however, before the employment of the typewriter became general outside of the business field, and then it came about through the development of a new type of machine, especially designed for the owner’s personal use. The portable typewriter, small, light, compact, convenient, and easy to carry anywhere in its traveling case, proved to be the type of machine desired by the personal user. The earliest of the portables was the small Blickensderfer, a type-wheel machine. The first type-bar portable machine to attract wide notice was the Corona, which dates from the year 1912. Today there are a number of these machines, including the portable Remington, Underwood, Hammond, Gourland and others, two of these, the Remington and Gourland, with keyboards like those on the big machines. The rapid progress of the portable in its own field points clearly to the time when the use of the typewriter for every kind of writing will be nearly universal.
The accounting machine and the portable, different as they are in nearly every way, have one point in common. Both have contributed to what we may call the intensive use of the writing machine. One other development, which concerns its extensive use, will close the list.