It just doesn't add up.
I know what it is, but I don’t know how it works. This dinosaur from offices past was forgotten in a bedroom in the suburbs. It’s a Victor adding machine, a mechanical precursor to the calculator. I had previously only seen them in movies, where an accountant wearing a visor, with a pencil behind his ear, would bang at the keys, pull a lever, and rip off a slip of paper much like a cashier’s receipt.
The adding machine is a nearly forgotten piece of business life. It has gone the way of the three-martini lunch, ashtrays at every desk, and the keypunch. It is now nothing more than a quaint relic to a more primitive time.
Probably a better (made) toy then what we can buy today for our kids. Does it have the pull handle to total and move the adding machine tape up? Some “Antiques” of little value are great for taking the brutality of a little child.
It did have the handle for moving the tape up, but it didn’t have any paper in it so I never got the chance to try that thing out. I kind of wish I had it in my office, though, for when my abacus is on the fritz.
My daddy had one of those. I remember the sound — kur Chunk, kur Chunk, kur Chunk!