The Collaborative International Dictionary
Comptometer \Comp*tom"e*ter\, n. [See Count; -meter.] A calculating machine; an arithmometer.
Wiktionary
n. A mechanical or electromechanical calculator; an adding machine without a crank, driven instead by keypress.
Wikipedia
[[Image:Comptometer model ST Super Totalizer.png|thumb|upright=1.2|right|
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The comptometer was the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator, patented in the USA by Dorr E. Felt in 1887.
A key-driven calculator is extremely fast because each key adds or subtracts its value to the accumulator as soon as it is pressed and a skilled operator can enter all of the digits of a number simultaneously, using as many fingers as required, making them sometimes faster to use than electronic calculators. Consequently, in specialized applications, comptometers remained in use in limited numbers into the early 1990s, but with the exception of museum pieces, they have all now been superseded by electronic calculators and computers.
Manufactured without interruption from 1887 to the mid-1970s it was constantly improved; first it was made faster and more reliable, then a line of electro-mechanical models was added in the 1930s, but especially it was the first mechanical calculator to receive an all-electronic calculator engine in 1961, with the ANITA Mark VII model released by Sumlock Comptometer, therefore creating the link in between the mechanical and the electronic calculator industries.
Although the comptometer was primarily an adding machine, it could also do subtractions, multiplication and division. Its keyboard consisted of eight or more columns of nine keys each. Special comptometers with varying key arrays were produced for a variety of special purposes, including calculating currency exchanges, times and Imperial weights. The name comptometer was formerly in wide use as a generic name for this class of calculating machine.
Usage examples of "comptometer".
Only he compromised by making the girl a comptometer operator instead of a stenographer, and a redhead instead of a blonde.
Then, as Bitter walked into the room, he returned his attention to the stack of papers on his desk, reaching several times from them to punch buttons on his Monroe Comptometer, then waiting with impatience as the automatic calculator clicked and spun through its computation process.
If the DCNO didn't understand that my desk is crowded with stacks of paper and a clerk's comptometer because I'm working, fuck him.
Morgen was out of sight when the Saint got outside, but the blundering and crashing of his flight could be heard distinctly in the coppice to the left, and Simon's brain was working like a comptometer nowwhen it was a little late.
The air in the office was thick and stuffy, and there was an incessant thudding from the typewriters, jarring of the comptometer, and the general buzz that men think necessary to business.
Without a comptometer to hand, it was difficult to say which of the two generals was wearing the more decorations.
He would have to take the money in a little box to the huge clacking hotel treasury full of comptometers that -- so Larry in the Harlequin Bar upstairs had asserted -- if programmed proper could be made to see right through to your very soul.
SLOANE—ARCHITECT, and pushed into a huge room filled with the almost unbearable clatter of typewriters and Comptometers, the buzz of voices, and the jarring thump of an addressing machine.
SLOANEARCHITECT, and pushed into a huge room filled with the almost unbearable clatter of typewriters and Comptometers, the buzz of voices, and the jarring thump of an addressing machine.