The Add-em toy adding machine

This is the Add-em toy adding machine. It’s made from these pressed metal sheets, and on the bottom are the instructions, and it also says that it was made by the Western Stamping Company under the brand name Tom Thumb products. The Western Stamping Company was founded in 1939, but it wasn’t until 1945 that they started making toys, and they started with a toy cash register. That was hugely successful. They made half a million of those each year, and they also made a very successful toy typewriter, also under the Tom Thumb brand name. This is one of their less successful and less well-known products. It’s an adding machine. It has a register with three digits, and there are three buttons.

01:13 - Each button increments the appropriate digit so if you press the hundred button, it adds a hundred to the number. It has a carry mechanism, so if a number rolls over past nine the next digit should increment as well. There is no clearing mechanism, so to reset the register to zero you have to set each digit to zero by pressing the buttons, starting from the right, all the way to the left. The Western stamping company, they continued making toys in America until around 1975, and then all their production was outsourced to Japan and Korea and other Asian countries. That was the Add-em toy adding machine. Thank you for watching! .