Other improvements were made, and in 1891 the first hundred machines that were really marketable were manufactured. While still flushed with his success, Burroughs thought of the first fifty machines which had proved such a disappointment. These machines still remained in a dusty storeroom to mock him. Determined to get them out of his sight and memory, he seized them and threw them one by one from a window to the pavement below.
“There’s an End to My Troubles,” Said William Seward Burroughs as He Threw into the Street the First Fifty Adding Machines He Had Made
He wished nothing to remain to remind him of this early failure.
Courtesy of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.
When he had disposed of the last one, he called Mr. Boyer to see the ruin. “There,” he exclaimed, “I have ended the last of my troubles.”
The first machines were called “Registering Accountants,” and “Arithmometers.” Burroughs lived to see the fulfilment of his dreams and the machine a commercial success. He died September 14, 1898, at his country home in Citronelle, Alabama, a victim of tuberculosis.
There were at that time 8,000 banks in the country, and it was Burroughs’ idea that as soon as these were supplied the market for adding machines would be exhausted. Today, there are more than 200,000 adding machines of that one make in use.
The need for an all-around office assistant that could multiply, divide, subtract as easily as it could add, was an idea nourished in the mind and thought of a young student of the University of Michigan.
After graduation, Jay R. Monroe turned his attention to clerical and commercial lines. He became acquainted with all the different types of adding and so-called calculating machines. He saw their limitations and restrictions. He saw the need for versatility—for more simplicity in operation—for getting away from arbitrary rules—for release from the sapping mental tax.