spending Money by Machinery 



Bv Herbert Francis Sherwood 



THERE were no commercial type- 

 writers in Abraham Lincoln's day. 

 The great President often wrote his let- 

 ters himself. Even with the invention 

 of the time and labor-saving typewriter, 

 there are some tasks in writing 

 which a great man, like the 

 president of a cor- 

 poration. 



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V> 





One of New York's new 



pay checks which are 



printed, filled in, and 



signed by machinery 



could not well leave to 

 subordinates and which 

 were impossible of ac- 

 complishment on a ma- 

 chine. Such are the sign- 

 ing of checks and the 

 signing of stock certifi- 

 cates and bonds. The 

 average executive accus- 

 tomed to the signing of 

 papers, cannot, without 

 fatigue, attach his name 

 to more than twenty-five 

 hundred in a day. In 

 these times, when govern- 

 ments and corporations 

 issue bonds representing 

 millions upon millions of 

 dollars, and have pay- 

 rolls carrying thousands 

 upon thousands of names, 

 the task of signing a name 

 in some cases has become 

 an indescribable drudgery. 

 Yet it must be done by re- 



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sponsible persons whose time is especial- 

 ly valuable. 



One of the greatest corporations in the 

 world is the municipality of New York. 

 It has more than ninety thousand em- 

 ^ p oyees receiving more than 



one hundred and five million 

 dollars in wages and salaries 

 in the course of a year. In 

 1915 the finance department 

 of this corporation intro- 

 duced a method of filling.out 

 pay checks and signing them 

 by machinery, and thus 

 saved seventy-five per cent 

 in cost, and accomplished 

 work formerly requiring 

 more than sixtyofifice-holders. 



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The electxic machine which fills in the checks with the 



name and amount at the rate of seventy-five hundred 



an hour or about twenty per second 



346 



