There has always been a need for
counting in commerce and trade: one of the earliest tools,
the abacus, is
still used in parts of Asia for performing arithmetic
processes. By the middle
of the 19th century, however, the cash drawer with dividers to
hold notes and coins had become a common feature in
retail establishments around the globe.
As business volume grew in the
latter part of the 19th century, there arose a need for a quick and
accurate summaries of daily transactions for each point of sale and
this saw the development of the cash register.
Click on the images below to see the fine detail on our 1905 NCR
Cash Register.
Invention of the cash register
The cash register was invented in 1879 by James Ritty, a saloon
keeper from Ohio, USA. He patented a machine with a mechanism
similar to one he had seen count the revolutions of an ocean
liner's propeller in its engine room. There was a bell to ring up
sales and it also had an adder that summed all the cash values of
the key presses during a day.
Ritty's invention caught the eye of John H Patterson, when he
purchased several machines for use in his store. Patterson brough
the rights to the patent by James and John and put it into
production under the auspices of his newly formed company, National
Cash Register, better now known as NCR.
Ka-ching!
From 1888 to the outbreak of the
First World War, the NCR cash register, with its familiar
cast-metal cases, spread into nearly every retail establishment
with more than 1.5 million being sold. The typical cash
register of this period was the cast brass-encased design,
many of which can still be seen today. Cash registers were also
made in materials other than brass, including cast-iron, wood and
metal, with finishes of polished brass, nickel plate, antiqued
copper, paint and silver and gold plate.
100 years on
Today, cash registers can be attached
to scanners, barcode
scanners and credit card terminals. Increasingly, dedicated
cash registers are being replaced with general purpose computers with point-of-sale (POS)
software.
They are used perform a multiude of
tasks which can include: scanning a barcode for each
item, retrieving the price from a database, calculating
deductions for items on sale, calculating the sales tax, recording the
transaction in detail including each item purchased, recording the
method of payment and keep totals for each product or type of
product sold.