The Golden Gem adding machine enjoyed a long sales success through the first half of the 20th century. It was based on the Arithmachine of Heinrich Goldmann (a.k.a as Henry Goldman) from the late 1890s, and on the efforts of three inventors—Abraham Gancher (a Russian Jew and emigrant to the USA), Nobyoshi Hakrew Kodama (a Japanese emigrant to the USA), and Albert T. Zabriskie (1854-1937).
The Golden Gem was introduced in 1906 (in fact, the first version was merely called Gem, in 1912 it was renamed the Golden Gem) by the Automatic Adding Machine Co. of New York, and was based not so on the first similar patent in the USA, taken by Nobyoshi Kodama (patent N. 753586, assigned one-half to Rebecca, the wife of Abraham Gancher), but on the second patent (US pat. No. 816342, taken by Kodama and Gancher). The company’s advertising from 1917 claimed over 100000 had been sold by that year. At that point, they cost $10 each. From the serial numbers, it seems more than 400000 devices were produced. It is unclear when production ended, but so many were made that it seems likely to have continued through the 1930s and possibly into the 1940s, although the advertising appears to have dried up in the mid-1920s after about 200000 had been made.
The device’s overall size is 6.9 cm x 13 cm x 10 cm, and it was quite heavy, some 750 g. To operate the Golden Gem, the stylus is inserted into a link corresponding to the desired number and pulled down. As the continuous chain revolves, it advances a number wheel whose value is seen in the window at the top. When a wheel revolves from 9 to 0, a tens carry mechanism automatically advances the next wheel by one. (This works well, but advancing the tens carry on multiple digits at once (e.g., from 999 to 1000) requires some extra hand strength!).
Subtraction is possible (via the nines complement method) using the red numbers shown to the right of each chain. The result register is cleared by turning the knob at the bottom right until all digits show zero.
Automatic Adding Machine Co. also produced a tally counter. It was basically the same as the Golden Gem, except it had five digits, had shorter chains, and instead of the slots in the front, there was a lever on the right that incremented the units digit. Gancher also designed a version with a printing mechanism, but this was even less successful than the counter.
Abraham Gancher went on to patent and sell a printing adding machine that was also sold by Automatic Adding Machine Co. as the Gancher (see U.S. patents 1047199 (1912) and 1178227 (1916)), but without success.
Biography of Abraham Gancher
It seems the main driving force behind Golden Gem and Automatic Adding Machine Co. of New York was Abraham Gancher, so let’s see what is known about him.
Abraham Isaac Gancher was a Russian Jew, born on 13 July 1875 as Абрам Ицхак Четрович (Abram Yitzchak Chetrovich) in a “shtetl” (a small Jewish town or village in eastern Europe), named Temir-Khan-Shurá (Темир-Хан-Шура), Kavkaz (now Buynaksk, Dagestan, Russian Federation). He emigrated as a teenager to the USA in 1892 (most probably due to “pogroms” (anti-Jewish riots) that swept the southern and western provinces of the Russian Empire in the 1880s), alongside his parents, Isaac (Chaim Yitzchak) Gancher (1846-1934) and Sarah (nee Berezonsky) Gancher (1850-1919), his brother Jacob (Yaakov) Isaac (1882-1958, who became a physician and surgeon), and two sisters: Lizzie Gancher-Bergman (1871-1960) and Fannie Gancher-Husinsky (1881-1966). The family initially settled in Hartford, Connecticut, but soon moved to Waterbury, Connecticut, where Abraham used to work as a leather salesman in the late 1890s.
In 1899, Abraham Gancher married Rebecca (b. 1876 in New York), and they lived there and had six sons, the youngest of whom was Simon. Abraham Gancher became interested in adding machines a few years later and worked in this area for more than ten years (he was active in the Automatic Adding Machine Company through at least 1918). Besides the several patents for adding machines, he also got a patent for an appliance for educational, amusement, and advertising purposes (US1075248). Gancher was also a small-handwriting specialist and had, apparently, procured himself a place in Ripley’s Believe It or Not by writing the Bill of Rights on a postage stamp! In the 1920s, Abraham worked in the family business (industrial surplus) on Broadway but eventually lost everything in a gamble to buy a seat on the NY Exchange.
Abraham Gancher died on 1 September 1965, in New York.