I have an old Smith Corona cash register (but it’s really just an adding machine with a cash drawer under it). I would guess this puppy is from the 50s.
Controls, L to R:
X<->E (forward/back) knob on upper the left side
A-J letter keys (departments, yes?)
3 columns of $ keys
2 columns of cent keys
Tax, PO, CR, CHG, NS, REC keys
T, S, NA buttons on the far right
The money buttons work and the amount prints when I crank the handle. How do I get it to add, subtract, etc?
I searched online for a manual, but my google-foo is weak.
A cash register is not an adding machine. For adding machine, see “10 key adding machine”.
None of these will do more than add and subtract. The cash register does not subtract - it adds up purchases.
Can you post a pic (on a photo-hosting site, link to it here)?
Do you hace a model number? I don’t recall SC (or SCM) making cash registers, but what do I know.
I’m not sure what all those buttons mean, but I think I have a general idea of how old cash registers worked. I worked for many years as a programmer, working on one brand of modern, computerized, data-base driven cash register.
(ETA: For a long long time, modern electronic cash registers tended to simply emulate the older mechanical ones, plus adding lots of new whiz-bang features, rather than totally break with the old model and find new better ways for an electronic register to work. Merchants had become familiar with their good ol’ clunky registers and wanted new ones that worked just the same way, so they didn’t have to learn anew how to operate them thar new-fangled thingies.)
Does this register allow you to ring up more than one item per sale, like any modern register does? If so, it would print the total on the receipt. I suspect that registers of the vintage you describe DON’T do that. Is each individual item you sell is a complete sale unto itself?
Somewhere inside the machine, you should be able to find a set of “registers” – that is, mechanical counters resembling the mechanical odometers on older cars. There should be one for each department. When you sell anything, you would typically select a department, and the sale would be added to the register for that department. At the end of each business day, you would do some “Close Day and Reset” procedure that reads out the departmental totals for the day, and resets all those counters to zero for the next day.
There might also be a separate register that accumulates the grand total for the day.
So those departmental registers are your adding-machine totals. And like a typical modern pocket calculator that has multiple storage registers that can accumulate many separate totals all independently, those departmental totals registers should work like that.
I suppose you could get it to subtract by ringing up a return or refund.
Those totals are pretty much the entire reason for cash registers to exist. At the end of the day, the store owner or manager would count the money in the drawer. Those totals, especially the grand total, told him how much money OUGHT to be in the drawer. So, he could detect if there was money missing or extra money, either of which could indicate that the cashier is incompetent or stealing.
One brand of cash register I saw an old ad for, advertised it as “The Incorruptible Cashier” for that reason.
The CHG and REC buttons might be for ringing up charges to a house charge account, and for receiving payments from the customer toward that account. If that’s correct, there might be registers to accumulating those totals too.
ETA:
CR might mean “Credit” – that is, if you give a customer credit for something. But I’m not sure what an old-style cash register would do with that information.
PO might mean Paid Out – meaning, that the cashier (or manager) received merchandise or services or something from a vendor, and paid the vendor on-the-spot with money taken out of the cash drawer. Since the register must keep track of the total amount of cash in the drawer (that being the whole point of a cash register’s existence) there must be some internal register to add those up too.
And some of those would have a real problem if you tried to divide by zero. They would get into an infinite loop – repeatedly subtracting 0 from the total until the total is reduced to zero. If you tried this with one of the early electric adding machines (which were just the same old mechanical ones but driven by an electric motor instead of a hand crank), they would go on forever. You had to do some kind of mechanical intervention to get them to stop.
Quickly enough, the manufacturers devised machines that could catch that error and stop themselves (or not even start), or had some lever or button on the front panel by which the operator could manually stop a divide-by-zero error.
The T and S buttons might mean Total and Subtotal. Those would only be meaningful if the register does, in fact, let you ring up multiple items in one sale. If that’s the case, then you’ve got your adding machine right there.
I don’t remember the make or model, but there was one of those electromechanical calculators in the lab where I had a summer job in 1971 +/- a year (can’t remember if I was just finishing high school or just starting univ.). Having a warped sense of humour at the time (still do) I took great delight in making the poor thing try to divide by zero and listen to it chug away endlessly.
I have a small collection of old electro-mechanical calculators from Friden and Monroe, and they are real beasts to lift and to operate. My Monroe calculator is fully automatic, in that it will do the repeated additions to perform multiplication, but boy is it noisy! I can’t imagine an office full of these machines all running at the same time. I was hoping to see Mad Men or some other TV show have some people using them and showing us how noisy offices were then, but they’re finicky so I imagine it’d be hard to get more than a couple working at the same time.
There are collectors of the old calculators and cash registers, but they’re surprisingly hard to find, especially the late models. I think everyone scrapped them for their metal content (about 40 pounds) as soon as electronic calculators were available.
Drifting even further from the thread topic: The same happened to those old mechanical music machines. There is a museum in Sylmar, Ca. (part of Los Angeles), primarily of vintage cars, that has one floor devoted to those old music boxes. The docent (who was dressed up as a formal butler) pointed out that, once record players developed adequate quality, people began scrapping their old music boxes, mostly for firewood.
The letter keys are indeed for departments. I haven’t seen this type, but I suspect it’s an adding machine/cash register. I assume it has a lever, though some models might be electric.
To use:
Press the letter key for the department.
Press the amount in the dollar rows. The three columns are for hundreds, tens, and ones. You can leave the first column alone if it’s less than $100, and the second column is left alone if it’s less than $10. If there’s a zero (e.g, $10), you may have to press the zero key.
It’s the same for the cents column. 57 cents would press the five and seven.
To register the amount, you pull the lever.
Repeat for additional items.
The “S” button subtotals. You press it and pull the lever.
If you need to calculate tax, you do so on the subtotal. Enter the amount and press the “TAX” key, then pull the lever.
To total the amount, press the “T” and pull the lever.
NS is for “No Sale.” It opens the cash drawer without registering an amount.
CR is for “credit,” and used for a refund.
I’m not sure of the other keys, but “PO” probably means “purchase order” and CHG is “Charge.”
This wasn’t used as an adding machine except to add up several items. There was no need to subtract, since the only time that happens would be when you use the CR key.
It occurs to me that this is yet another sound from a bygone era: a mechanical cash register.
The sound of …click…click…click…karrumph…click…click…Ding!
and so on endured well into the eighties in small stores.
Nowadays folks probably don’t recognize the same familiar sounds of cash registers when Pink Floyd’s “Money” plays on the radio.
It’s kind of like the ubiquitous record scratch sound that radio commercials still like using to signal an abrupt transition–they should be careful these days because that sound has no meaning for the younger crowd, yet it sounds awkwardly close to an exaggerated unzipping zipper sound.
R. Chuck, thanks for the detail. When I try to push the T button, the S & NA buttons move too. I suspect something is stuck in there. Every time I pull the crank, the cash drawer opens…so T is stuck perhaps? I tried different settings of the X<->E lever, but no joy. I’ll pull it apart again and look at the mechanism on the R side.
Update: apparently you have to hold down the Total or Subtotal key with your left hand while cranking with your right. Works great! Total does extra feeds on the paper tape so that the printing comes up above the tear-off.
Now if only I could find out what the X<->E and NA buttons are supposed to do.
