18881776 Club
A bank clerk's ledger fix becomes a patented machine
Patent No. 388,116 gives William Seward Burroughs his first commercially workable design, three years after he first filed.
Bank clerks spent their days adding long columns of figures by hand, and mistakes cost money. On August 25, 1888, William Seward Burroughs received U.S. patent No. 388,116 for a calculating machine, the first design from his workshop that actually worked well enough to sell. Three related patents issued the same day, August 25, 1888, the fruit of work he had started at the Boyer Machine Shop in St. Louis. The design became the foundation of the company that eventually bore his name…
