Wiktionary
n. A simple mechanical or electromechanical calculator that could only perform simple calculations such as addition or subtraction
WordNet
Wikipedia
An adding machine was a class of mechanical calculator, usually specialized for bookkeeping calculations. In the United States, the earliest adding machines were usually built to read in dollars and cents. Adding machines were ubiquitous office equipment until they were phased out in favor of calculators in the 1970s and by personal computers beginning in about 1985. The older adding machines were rarely seen in American office settings by the year 2000.
Blaise Pascal and Wilhelm Schickard were the two original inventors of the mechanical calculator in 1642; For Pascal this was an adding machine that could perform additions and subtractions directly and multiplication and divisions by repetitions, whilst Schickard's machine, invented several decades earlier was less functionally efficient but was supported by a mechanised form of multiplication tables. These two were followed by a string of inventors and inventions leading to those of Thomas de Colmar who launched the mechanical calculator industry in 1851 when he released his simplified arithmometer (it took him thirty years to refine his machine, patented in 1820, into a simpler and more reliable form). However, they did not gain widespread use until Dorr E. Felt started manufacturing his comptometer (1887) and Burroughs started the commercialization of differently conceived adding machines (1892).
An adding machine is a form of calculator.
'''Adding machine ''' may also refer to:
- The Adding Machine, 1923 play by Elmer Rice
- The Adding Machine (film), 1969 film based on the play
- Adding Machine (musical), 2007 musical based on the play
- The Adding Machine: Collected Essays, collection of writings by William S. Burroughs
Adding Machine is a musical adaptation of Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine, with music by Joshua Schmidt, and book and lyrics by Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt. The show opened in 2007 in Illinois before moving Off-Broadway in 2008. The show was nominated for (and later won) numerous Lucille Lortel Awards and Drama Desk awards.
Usage examples of "adding machine".
Thompson of the five-hundred-thousand-dollar reward, her voice clear and cutting, like the sound of an adding machine punching out the sum of a bill.
Ask Groves whether something could be built, how long it would take, and how much it would cost, and he'd answer in detail, whether immediately or after he'd gone to work with a slide rule and an adding machine.
If one turned an idiot loose on an adding machine to let him audit the company books and let him prevent the auditor10 from touching equipment and data which has to be his if any answers will be right, one would get very little in the way of correct answers.
Then a lovely little adding machine broke down, and I was called on to get that working.
There was only one other customer inside the gallery, a young man in a black overcoat casually riffling through a rack of prints while a woman with long blond hair worked an adding machine behind the counter.
Anyone who happened to glance in his office and saw him scribbling notes and intently examining the tape on the adding machine would have thought he was an old pro.
There was a desk, typewriter and adding machine, racks of ring-binders and filing cabinets.
The woman behind the adding machine gave him a strange speculative smile and waved him in.