by Paula Bosse
Behold, the Burroughs Portable Subtractor! A beautiful machine, a beautiful ad (click ad to see larger image).
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Sources & Notes
Ad from the December 30, 1929 issue of Time magazine, which hit the newsstands just a few weeks after the stock market crash, a time when some companies might have been hesitant to spend $125 (about $1,800 in today’s money) on new office equipment.
The history of the Burroughs Corporation can be found on Wikipedia here; more on the company via a handy timeline is here; read about the machine’s inventor and founder of the company, William Seward Burroughs I here and here; and, yes, read about the Beat writer William S. Burroughs (grandson of the man who invented the adding machine and founded the company in St. Louis in 1886) here.
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Copyright © 2017 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
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