Label
from "Pieces of the Past" 2017 at the OSH
Comptometer, model M
The first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator.
The Comptometer was an important precursor to the digital calculator and the computer and it made its inventor, Dorr Eugene Felt into a very wealthy man.
Based on the serial number, 404729, this Comptometer is a Model M and was probably made in early 1940.
Dorr Eugene Felt was born in Beloit, Wisconsin, in 1862—the eldest of twelve children. At the age of 15, Dorr left his local school and started working in a machine shop. A few years later, with only 50 cents in his pocket, he went to Chicago to work on a maintenance crew at the Pullman Company; and then as a travelling sewing machine salesman; and then as a machinist.
Felt was in his early 20s when, in 1884, he built his first Comptometer. Because of his limited resources and scarce funds, he recycled a wooden macaroni box for the outside casing, and used staples, skewers and rubber bands for the mechanism insides. Today, his original “macaroni box” prototype is in the collection of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.
In 1889, he founded the Felt & Tarrant Manufacturing Company with Chicago businessman Robert Tarrant, and this continued to play an important part in the calculator industry until the 1970s. Felt attained some 46 domestic and 25 foreign patents, virtually all related to the Comptometer.
In 1919, Felt bought several hundred acres of rolling farm and duneland north of Saugatuck, and named this estate Shore Acres Farm. Construction of the Felt Mansion began in 1925.
