Joseph Edmondson
In the early 1880s the inventor Joseph Edmondson from Halifax, Yorks, England, devised an interesting circular calculating machine, based on the stepped-drum mechanism of Leibniz, which he patented in 1883 in Great Britain (patent No. 188316, from 1 January 1883) and in France (patent No. 158544, 14 Nov 1883). The..Read More
Charles Pidgin
The prominent US statistician, romance novelist, and amateur engineer Charles Felton Pidgin (1844-1923) from Boston, Mass., was a holder of quite a few patents (at least ten) for various devices, like indicator, apparatus for compiling statistics (Pidgin’s system for the census, the so-called “chip” system, in the late 1880s was..Read More
Otto Büttner
On 25 Sep 1883 Carl (Karl) Otto Büttner (1859-), a young mechanical engineer from Dresden, Germany, patented (together with his partner Carl Gustav Heyde) his first calculating machine (German patent №DE26640). Carl Gustav Th. Heyde (born on 25 Sep 1846 in Dresden, died 13 Nov 1930 in Dresden), was an..Read More
Herman Hollerith
In 1879 the bright and unmanageable teenager Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) graduated with distinction from the School of Mines at Columbia University in New York and went to work as a special agent for the US Census Office in Washington, D.C. One of his professors of engineering, William P. Trowbridge (1828-1892),..Read More
David Rush
David Marion Rush of Louisburg, Missouri, applied for a patent for ten-key non-printing manually operated adding machine on 25 July 1883, and the patent (U.S. Patent Nr. 292256) was granted on 22 January 1884. A part of the patent model survived to our time and it is kept now in..Read More
Dorr Felt
In 1884, a young 22 years old machinist, while working with a planer (machine tool used for shaping or surfacing metal and other materials) in Ostrander and Huke machine workshop in Chicago, took note of how a planning machine controlled varying depths of cut and conceived an idea from watching..Read More
William Burroughs
In 1875, the young William Seward Burroughs, son of a mechanic from Rochester, New York, according to the father’s desire to choose a gentleman’s vocation, entered the Cayuga County National Bank of Auburn as a clerk. There he spent long and tedious hours of adding numbers. He was already interested..Read More
William Macnider
In September 1884, a certain William John Macnider of Greensborough, Georgia, applied for a patent for keyboard adding machine. The patent (US patent No. 322190) was granted on 14 July 1885 (the administrator of the patent was Quintin Macnider, as William Macnider died meanwhile on 6 March 1885, in Belleville,..Read More