Burroughs, William S.

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William S. Burroughs

American inventor William Seward Burroughs (1855-1898) designed the world's first commercially viable adding machine, the Burroughs Registering Accountant, in 1892. Strong sales laid the foundation for the Burroughs Corporation, which was a Detroit manufacturing and computer powerhouse for much of the twentieth century.

Burroughs was born on January 28, 1855, in Auburn, New York, a town in Cayuga County. His parents were Edmund and Ellen Julia Burroughs, and he had an older brother and sister as well as a younger sibling. Edmund Burroughs was a model-maker for castings, which were used to create prototypes for new products. Burroughs left the Auburn public schools at the age of 15 to train as a bank clerk, and it was this professional beginning that inspired his later invention. Clerks had to spend long hours poring over ledger columns to find errors in addition or subtraction when the columns refused to balance, and finding these mistakes was a tedious chore which was done entirely by hand. Burroughs later went on to hold similar jobs in a retail establishment and later a lumber yard.

Moved to St. Louis

Around 1875, when he was about 20 years old, Burroughs moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and over the next decade he married, started a family, and worked for a manufacturer of woodworking tools and machinery. He began to think about his own ideas and how they might be realized, especially for an adding machine he called the arithmometer. In 1884 he found a financial backer in the form of Thomas B. Metcalf, whom he had met on visit to Metcalf's shop. By this point Burroughs's father had also relocated to the area, and the the younger Burroughs worked on the first prototypes for the adding machine in his father's model shop. By the end of 1885 he had had come up with a rudimentary device, and though it was not yet commercially ready, it did help him and Metcalf to find more backers, this time in the form of a pair of St. Louis merchants. Their new company, founded with start-up capital of $100,000, was called the American Arithmometer Company. It was incorporated in January of 1886 with Burroughs as vice president and Metcalf as president.

The funding helped Burroughs finish a new model, which he called the Burroughs Registering Accountant. It had a nine-key design, and to prevent human error the keys would lock up if two of them were pressed at once. Furthermore, the user could easily verify that the sum just entered was correct because each key would stay depressed until the user pulled the handle lever to record the transaction. It also had printing capabilities and glass panels that allowed the user to see the workings. Burroughs contracted with the Boyer Machine Company in St. Louis to serve as the manufacturer, and the initial order of 50 machines was finished late in 1887. The machines, however, proved problematic and consistently broke down, and at one point Burroughs threw several machines from the defective shipment out of his office window.

First Model Sold for $475

In 1892 Burroughs received patents for a machine that recorded each item in the tally and the final result. The first Burroughs Registering Accountant machines, in muchimproved form, went on sale that same year for a price of $475 each. The exorbitant cost did not deter its sale to banks and other financial institutions, who were its first major customers once they saw that the device was both reliable and accurate. By 1895, 284 machines had been sold and the company opened a sales office in London. Unfortunately, Burroughs—whose health had been poor for much of his adult life—did not survive to see the impressive success his company would achieve. He died of tuberculosis on September 15, 1898, in Citronelle, Alabama, at the age of just 44. He and his wife, Ida Selover Burroughs, had four children: Jennie, Horace, Mortimer, and Helen. Mortimer's son was named in honor of his inventor grandfather, and went on to become a notable figure in American letters in the twentieth century as avant-garde novelist William S. Burroughs (1914-1997).

The company Burroughs founded would sell a stunning 1,500 adding machines in 1900. It soon moved its headquarters to Michigan, where it emerged as one of the mainstays of the local economy. The name was changed from the American Arithmometer Company to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company. Helmed by Joseph Boyer, who had owned the original company, it then contracted to manufacture the machines. The Burroughs Corporation, as it eventually became known, went on to develop impressive new technologies that paved the way for modern information science technology, including the first widely used mainframe computers. Its successes were often overshadowed by those of its nearest competitor, IBM, or International Business Machines, Inc. The company entered a new era in 1986 when it merged with the Sperry Corporation to become Unisys.