On August 21, 1888, a 28-year-old former bank employee got it the first patent for a calculating machine, he founded a company to produce it that ten years later, when he died, he had already sold over a thousand which became a million in 1926. His name was William Seward Burroughs and if the name tells you something, yes, he was the grandfather of the famous writer and poet of the beat generation.
He was born in Rochester, New York, the son of a mechanic, from whom he inherited a technical passion. But after he got married, at 19, he had to find a job and got into a bank. Here he realized how necessary a tool was «to do the math» and that became his dream. Even when he left his post in the bank to move to St. Louis, he continued to work on the calculating machine. The first patent for a «calculating machine» he obtained it in 1888, and with some local entrepreneurs he founded the American Arithometer Co. to bring the calculator to market. But the car had flaws and Willam showed up a new patent in 1893 (in the meantime he had also obtained a patent for one clock radio). He died in 1898 but in his honor the company became the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, was moved to Detroit and was a large American company in the computer industry.
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