On this day in 1888, William Seward Burroughs of Rochester, New York, was granted patent number 388,116 for a key-driven calculating machine ", well, the drawing below says it plainly enough: seven sheets of levers, springs and toothed wheels, signed at the corner in a clerk's careful hand.
Burroughs had been a bank clerk himself, and the whole thing began with a sore wrist and a long column of figures. But the first machines had a fault: the answer depended on the operator. A gentle pull gave one total, an impatient yank another, because the mechanism overshot. Here's the clever bit. Rather than lecture the users, he fitted an oil-filled dashpot ", a little cylinder of fluid that resists a sudden shove ", so the stroke was slowed to the same speed every time, no matter how cross you were with the ledger. The machine stopped caring about your mood.
That is the quiet lesson of the thing. Not the gears, which were fine work, but the decision to design around tired people rather than for careful ones. A whole industry came out of it, and out of the countless clerks who cranked those handles ten thousand times a day and never once got a patent number of their own.
Wendell, worth remembering that in 1888 a computer was a person, generally paid by the column and expected to be right the first time. Burroughs did not replace them so much as give their wrists an ally.
Wendell, the family footnote is a joy: his grandson and namesake, William S. Burroughs, grew up to write novels instead of totting up columns. One Burroughs invented the machine that stopped caring about your mood; the other wrote books that absolutely did not.