Who invented the Cash Register?

Answer 1

The cash register was apparently invented out of desperation. The creator was James Ritty, an Ohio restaurateur. Ritty ran a café in Dayton in the 1870s. The place was popular and always filled with customers. Nevertheless, the business continually lost money. Ritty blamed the dishonesty of his bartenders, who either kept money in their pockets or in an unlocked cash drawer, often nothing more than an old http://www.answers.com/topic/cigar box. This loose monetary system did not provide anyway of keeping track of sales. If a customer returned to a shop after buying something, saying he had been overcharged or not given the correct change, there was no objective way to settle the dispute. The open box also meant that employees were always within reach of http://www.answers.com/topic/tempting cash. In Ritty's time, theft by clerks was a way of life, and shopkeepers had little defense against http://www.answers.com/topic/fidelity-bond. Ritty changed bartenders many times but continued to lose money until he was driven to a nervous breakdown.

To ease his mind, Ritty took a ship for Europe. On the ship he made friends with the ship's engineer, and spent hours in the engine room. There he observed the workings of an automatic device that recorded the revolutions of the ship's propellers. From this, Ritty imagined he could make a similar device that would record amounts of money passing through the cash drawer. He reputedly cut short his vacation to rush back and begin work on the prototype. Ritty assembled his first cash register in 1879, and patented a second, improved register later that year. Ritty went into business with "Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier' after perfecting a third model.

Ritty's early machines had two rows of keys running across the front, each key marking a money denomination from five cents through one dollar. Pressing the keys turned a shaft that moved an internal counter. This kept track of total sales for the day. The amount of each individual sale was shown to the customer on a dial similar to a clock face, with one hand for the cents and one for the dollars. Because the machine kept a daily total, any pilfering would be obvious. A later model kept the clock face and included a paper roll punched with pins to provide a more permanent record for the http://www.answers.com/topic/shopkeeper. However, Ritty was unable to http://www.answers.com/topic/ignite any excitement for his new device. Apparently he made only one sale, which was to John H. Patterson. Patterson ran a small coal business, but was so taken with the Incorruptible Cashier that he decided to buy Ritty's company.

Unfortunetely, Ritty had already sold his business to another party, Jacob Eckert. Eckert had made a vital addition to the machine, a bell that rang when a sale was made. Eckert ran the business as the National Manufacturing Company with several partners. John Patterson arrived in Dayton in 1884, eager to buy the small firm. After making a preliminary deal, he discovered that National Manufacturing was the http://www.answers.com/topic/laughingstock of Dayton. The company had not made any money, and no one believed that it could. Patterson tried to buy his way out of the contract, but was forced to complete the sale. Patterson changed the name of the firm to the National Cash Register Company.

The new company quickly improved the cash register. By 1890, the machines printed customer receipts as a standard feature. In 1906, the cash register was electrified. The company made a science of advertising and selling, becoming the role model for many other industries with its canned sales talks and innovative distribution of sales territories. By 1900, the company had sold over 200,000 registers and sent salesmen throughout Europe and South America. As early as 1896 it had sales in China, and by the end of World War I, National Cash Register was bringing in almost half its sales from overseas markets represented by at least 50 countries. The number of registers sold in 1922 alone was over two million. The company dominated the industry, buying up competitors when convenient. National Cash Register continued to develop its product line, coming out with new features to respond to customer demands. By 1944, the company had applied for 2,400 patents.

With the advent of micro processing technology in the 1970s, the cash register industry changed. Most of the manufacturing moved to factories in Asia, and eventually two basic types of cash register evolved. One type is the generally low-end, all-in-one machine usually referred to as an electronic cash register, or http://www.answers.com/topic/ecr. The other wing of the industry is the POS terminal, which is more than a cash register because of its superior data processing ability. Both are manufactured in similar ways, though the ECR may be shipped to the customer complete and ready to go, where the POS is made up of different components that may not meet up until the customer installs the terminal.

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