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| Smart Computing® Encyclopedia |
| Felt, Dorr Eugene | ||
| (1862 - 1930) In the 1880s, when the world was looking for an easier way to add up figures, Dorr Eugene Felt took a macaroni box and some meat skewers and turned them into the first key-based calculator called the Comptometer. Felt was born in Rock County, Wis., in 1862. He was raised on a farm and moved to Chicago in 1882 to find a job following his love of all things mechanical, which he developed while working in a machine shop as a boy. In Chicago, he took several jobs working with machines and eventually came up with an idea for a calculating machine. It wasn’t until 1885 that Felt was credited with making a rough version of his calculating machine out of a wooden macaroni box, rubber bands, and meat skewers. Over the next couple of years, Felt refined his Comptometer with metal parts. The first several thousand models, however, were encased in wooden boxes, although models produced after 1903 had metal casings. In March 1887, Felt applied for the patent for the Comptometer. Later that same year, Robert Tarrant, who owned a machine shop and helped Felt with financial support, joined in a partnership with Felt to build and sell Felt’s Comptometers. About a year later the company became known as Felt & Tarrant Manufacturing, a company that Felt founded and served as chief executive officer during his lifetime. In 1957 the company became the Comptometer Corp., which eventually merged with Victor Adding Machine Co. in 1961 to become the Victor Comptometer Corp. The innovative thing about the Comptometer was that it was key-driven. Other adding machines of the time required a user to set dials. With the Comptometer, the operator pressed keys in each of the columns, which set a numbered wheel mechanism that instantly displayed the appropriate number in the display window. Pressing the 1 key would move the wheel one motion. There was no zero; the operator left a column empty to represent zero. Operators could also press two keys at once that would add up to the number represented in that column, and the device would display that number. For example, pressing the 1 and 3 keys at the same time in the same column would move the wheel once, and then three more times, resulting in the number 4 appearing in the display. People who had a great deal of experience with a Comptometer could also apply a few tricks that let them perform subtraction, multiplication, and division with the Comptometer. The machine was extremely fast because operators could enter numbers in each column at the same time rather than typing each number of a figure in sequential order, like what is done with current calculators. The actual machine weighed about 17 to 25 pounds, and several early models are found at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. The first Comptometers were used in U.S. Treasury offices and eventually were in demand by other Chicago offices. At the same time that Felt developed his Comptometer, William S. Burroughs developed his own adding machine with a printed listing feature, giving Felt’s Comptometer a significant amount of competition. In fact, there is still some question over who first developed a key- driven adding machine. However, Felt’s Comptometer became so popular at the time that the generic name for a calculator was considered Comptometer. Felt & Tarrant claimed that if a device was not a Felt & Tarrant Comptometer, it was not a Comptometer. Comptometers were used in some accounting offices until the 1970s, and then computers began replacing them; computers had added accounting abilities. The Comptometer wasn’t the end of Felt’s inventions, though. He was also credited with inventing the first printing desk calculator in 1889, called the Comptograph. He also boasted a large number of U.S. and foreign patents. Felt married his wife, Agnes McNulty, in 1891, and they had four daughters. He died in 1930 of a stroke. | ||
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