LABOR SAVING SYSTEMS 373 



were beside him. The postal cards may be purchased for 10 

 cents each, Ijiit the machines cost a considerable sum. They are 

 becoming cheaper however as the demand for them increases. 



A machine that is one of the marvels even in this age of 

 rapid business, is known as the circular maiHng machine, a 

 device to fold, stamp, address, and paste newspapers and 

 circulars that go through the mails rolled in cylindrical form. 

 This machine, almost as large as a good sized newspaper 

 press, picks newspapers from a table at one end of it, rolls 

 them, pastes wrappers on them, addresses and stamps them 

 and deposits them in a mail bag at the other end, handling 

 1,000 or more an hour without making a mistake or requirinfr 

 any attention except to the pile of papers placed in front of 

 the machine. 



There have been invented many machines that are in 

 universal use to-day, designed to handle statistics and add, 

 multiply, or subtract large sums of figures. All of them are 

 exceedingly complex in their mechanism, but in operation 

 so simple that an office boy may operate them with the same 

 certainty of correct results as an expert mathematician. 

 The adding machine is probably used more widely than any 

 of this class of machines. In appearance it is somewhat of 

 the general outUne of a t3"pewriter, although slightly larger, 

 and with a keyboard much the same as that on a tj^ewriter. 

 If the capacity of the machine is 99,999,999 or $999,999.99 

 the keyboard has eight rows of keys. There are nine keys in 

 each row, numbered from 1 to 9. The first row at the right 

 is units, the second tens, the third hundreds and so on. Each 

 row operates a wheel upon which are the figures from to 9. 

 When it is desired to operate the machine the numbers to be 

 added are struck off on the keys. The numeral wheels re- 

 volve correspondingly; every time a wheel revolves once it 

 moves the next highest wheel upward one figure. When all 

 the figures to be added are set down, a lever is touched and 

 the result is printed at the bottom of the column. Multi- 

 pl3dng and subtracting machines work much upon the same 

 principle, the arrangement of the numeral wheels and their 

 mode of operation being about the only difference in their 

 construction from the adding machines. 



