Passengers caught nosing around a steamship’s engine room would ordinarily be quickly ushered out. But when James Ritty, a saloon keeper from Ohio, travelled to Europe in 1878 to recover from a breakdown, the ship’s chief officer humoured him. In his youth Ritty had trained as a mechanic, and he was curious about the steamship’s workings. He spent much of his voyage exploring the machinery, and as he studied a gauge that indicated the propeller’s revolutions, the saloon keeper had an idea: what if the sales of goods in a store could be gauged mechanically? The more he thought about it, the more agitated he became, and no sooner had he reached port than he jumped on the next ship home to begin a retail revolution.
JAMES RITTY had good reason to suffer a nervous breakdown. He ran a saloon in Dayton, Ohio, but no matter how many customers he attracted, he struggled to turn a profit. Like many traders, Ritty had only a rough idea of his sales, or even of whether he was making money or losing it. Bartenders plundered the cash drawer, and tracking down theft was frustratingly difficult.
Such were the worries on Ritty’s mind when he embarked on a steamship passage to Europe in 1878. A mechanic by training, he spent much of his time below decks, where he was struck by the workings of the propeller’s rpm gauge: “If the movements of a ship’s propeller can be recorded,” he thought, “there is no reason why the movements of sales in a store cannot be recorded.” In a flash, he had grasped the concept behind the cash register.
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Unknown to Ritty, the idea was already in the air. Shop owners had long experimented with strongboxes and alarms for their money drawers, and by 1876 inventors John Moss and John Smith of New York had built a “Cash Recording Machine”. This did not hold any money: it was essentially an adding machine that produced two receipts. One was for the customer, who now had the means to check the transaction, while the other remained inside the machine for the owner’s records. By the time Ritty sailed for Europe, Scientific American was advertising the Cash Recording Machine, price $75. The magazine’s editors saw the invention as the answer to the “Babel of confusion which exists in any large retail dry goods store” and failed “to see where the chance to defraud it exists”. Yet the machine did nothing to prevent under-the-counter sales, and there was still that open cash drawer to contend with.
At first, Ritty’s solution was even less satisfactory. In the workshop above his saloon he built the Ritty Patent Dial Register, a simple wooden case with a large dial and a pair of clock hands to indicate dollars and cents. The bottom of the register bristled with two rows of keys marked off in increments of 5 cents – the price of the cheapest drink in his saloon. Ritty’s register didn’t have a cash drawer nor did it produce a receipt for the customer. It did have one ingenious feature: when you turned the adder handle, a bell rang out with a loud ka-ching to assure customers the sale had been recorded. Without realising it, Ritty had created one of the world’s most instantly recognisable sounds.
A few prototypes later, the saloon keeper unveiled what he confidently called “Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier”. Costing an eye-watering $100, it still lacked a cash drawer, but boasted another advance: when its keys were depressed, mechanical tabs bearing the appropriate numbers popped up in a window. Customers could now inspect the price of each purchase as their order was “rung up”. Ritty also included a clever way to keep running totals. Depressing any key lowered a pin that punched a hole into an appropriate column on a scroll of paper. At the end of the day, the shopkeeper could tally the holes in the 5-cent column, the 10-cent column, and so forth, to check the takings. Though more primitive than later gear-wheel “total adders”, it did have one curiously prophetic feature. If your products all had different prices – 10-cent beers and 20-cent brandies, say – the separate columns gave you more than just total sales; they also indicated how well each product was selling.
“When you turned the handle a bell rang out with a loud ka-ching!”
One of Ritty’s early customers was John Patterson, an Ohio grocer who had been plagued by theft. Chancing on a circular advertising Ritty’s contraption, he immediately telegraphed for two. “When we saw them we were astonished at the cost,” he later recalled. They were “no more like a modern cash register than a birch-bark canoe is like an ocean liner”. Crude though they were, Patterson’s takings soared by $6000 a year.
Patterson ploughed his unexpected wealth into a new venture: he bought control of Ritty’s cash register business for $6500 in 1884 and renamed it the National Cash Register Company (NCR). By this time, Ritty had made some improvements to the machine, adding penny keys and a customer receipt, but he had grown tired of running two businesses. He was quite happy to watch his new industry’s progress from behind a bar. Under Patterson’s ownership, registers acquired cash drawers, including separate ones for different clerks so that the source of losses could be identified. The modern register had arrived.
Not everyone welcomed the invention. Clerks considered cash registers a slur on their honour and formed “Protective Associations”, even though some stores had taken steps before to curb their light-fingered ways. The most obvious had been “cash carriers”, a system of lines and pulleys to send payments to a central cashier, who then returned the change. But registers posed a more serious challenge, and clerks knew it. NCR touted its product as “a mathematical prodigy in brass and steel, all of whose computations are infallibly correct”, and advertised a mocking “confession” by old technology: “I am the oldest criminal in history…I am a thing of the past, a dead issue. I am a failure. I am the Open Cash Drawer” But registers also offered clerks new freedoms and new opportunities, by paving the way for department stores in which clerks no longer had to work within sight of supervisors.
With success, knock-offs proliferated. At least 136 cash register companies formed between 1886 and 1895 alone. Cheaply made registers were even given away free by cigar companies to store owners who carried their products. One such bare-bones “premium register”, the Simplex Cash Register, presented the clerk with holes marked off in different denominations. Instead of pressing a key, the clerk dropped marbles into the appropriate holes. These accumulated in separate grooves within the machine, like an abacus. Another company’s register introduced the dubious innovation of replacing the familiar ka-ching with a cuckoo call.
Store owners looking to impress their customers could splash out on wildly baroque brass and crystal confections. Like so much of Edwardian culture, the manufacture of these ornate creations did not survive the first world war. The huge demand for metal saw brass registers give way to models with sheet-metal housings, and they never recovered their old charm.
Despite the often whimsical design of the machines, the industry’s early decades were almost comically ruthless. NCR pioneered a hard-sell corporate culture of sales territories and direct-mail blitzes. NCR salesmen sabotaged cheap marble-registers by surreptitiously dropping lead shot tied with horsehair into the marble-holes in an attempt to show how unreliable they were. The company attacked competitors with patent suits, menaced competing salesmen, and aggressively marketed exchange schemes to root out other registers. The traded-in machines became yet another weapon against prospective rivals: as soon as a new manufacturer came on the scene and set up a showroom, a shop selling cheap second-hand registers would spring up next door. Those NCR couldn’t shut down it acquired, and after adding their innovations to NCR products it promptly closed them down.
By the turn of the 20th century, most of the world’s registers were produced by NCR, and retailing without them was becoming unthinkable. If that is redolent of today’s information technology, the connections don’t stop there. When the federal government prosecuted NCR for monopolistic practices in 1911, its graduates were already fanning out into the nascent information industry of timekeeping and punch-card tabulation devices, most notably at International Business Machines (IBM).
The technology has now almost turned full circle. Ritty’s first design lacked a cash drawer and had a pinhole adder; today’s machines deal with an ever-diminishing amount of actual cash, and are valued for the sales data they provide, though the pins and paper are now electrons and silicon. Perhaps it is fitting that although Ritty fathered the cash register, his invention held no cash at all. What he saw in that steamboat gauge was not the flow of cash. It was a flow of data.
