Purse Adding Machine

This is the Purse Adding Machine. It’s very small. It’s only about seven centimetres wide by five centimetres high, so just under three inches by two inches, and it’s small dial adder. It has three dials marked dollars, dimes, and cents, so it’s for use when you do your shopping. it has a built-in stylus, so you won’t lose it. You can store it here. To enter a number of dollars you just put the stylus next to the number you want, and turn it clockwise. Each dial has a number wheel connected to it.

00:55 - That displays the number you’ve entered and the total that you’ve done that you’ve made. It has no maker’s marks anywhere. There’s no branding. And it’s fairly cheaply made but it’s made of metal. It has two rivets holding the casing together It must have been made in the 1920s or 30s. The mechanism is somewhat similar to the Lightning Adder that came out in the early 1920s, because each dial has a number wheel attached to it, to the top right, and that wheel also takes care of the carries. Because it does have a carry mechanism, if you add, say, nine dimes, (a bit more… …

there you go) 02:08 - this wheel now increased to five. It doesn’t have a clearing mechanism, so to clear it you have to turn the wheels all to zero from right to left. Yeah, so now it’s zero. This machine is a bit of a mystery. I haven’t been been able to find any information about it on the internet. There’s no mention of it on any calculator sites, nor have I been able to find any advertisements in online archives. So yeah, it’s a mystery. So this was the purse adding machine. Thank you for watching! .