Burroughs, William (1857?-1898), an American businessman and inventor, developed the printing-adding machine. His invention helped automate offices throughout the world.
Burroughs was probably born on Jan. 28, 1857, in Auburn, New York. He spent part of his youth working as a bank clerk and became aware of the mistakes and boredom that resulted when adding long columns of numbers by hand.
Burroughs later moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and got a job in a machine shop. There he began work on inventing an adding machine. He formed a company and in 1888 patented a machine that could add a column of numbers and record its total. An improved model, patented in 1892, printed each entry and the total. In Burroughs’s lifetime, the company sold a small number of machines. But by 1913, the Burroughs Adding Machine Company was becoming a leader in office automation. His grandson William S. Burroughs became a well-known experimental novelist (see Burroughs, William S. ). William Burroughs died on Sept. 14, 1898.
