Golden Gem Adder
1907 · Chain Adder · Work 434 of 1,871
A small upright adding machine standing on its base, a narrow column of chain links running behind a slotted nickel faceplate, each link bearing a single digit, a row of small result windows across the top, each window showing the single digit 0, a lever at the side to advance the chain, a clearing knob at the top, every other surface plain bright nickel, the faceplate lettered "Golden Gem", standing on a dark baize-covered table before a deep neutral background, a single raking light from the left raking across the slotted faceplate.
- What it was used for
- A chain adder from the Automatic Adding Machine Co. of New York, worked with a stylus, seven columns in the standard version. The register turns only one way; subtraction was possible only through complementary digits. The Early Office Museum gives ten to fifteen dollars for 1906 to 1918, the fifteen-dollar Gem having a resetting device and the ten-dollar Automatic not. A company letter of 1908 accompanied a machine to be paid for in monthly instalments of five dollars and offered the recipient the sale of the machine in his own vicinity.
- What was new
- Against the Troncet-type slide adders, this device did the decisive thing by itself: the register carries the ten as soon as a digit passes nine, and a mechanism returns everything to zero. The number behind it is large: from the serial numbers Jaap Scherphuis estimates more than 400,000 were built, from about 1904 into the 1930s, possibly longer. The year 1907 is not an introduction but the dating of collection pieces; the patents are of 1904, 1906 and 1907 and the firm advertised "since 1904". The barb is the distance upward: while this device cost ten dollars, Burroughs, according to the Early Office Museum, listed seventy-eight models in 1911 at between 175 and 850 dollars.