Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/374

 spending Money by Machinery

��Bv Herbert Francis Sherwood

��THERE were no commercial type- writers in Abraham Lincoln's day. The great President often wrote his let- ters himself. Even with the invention of the time and labor-saving typewriter, there are some tasks in writing which a great man, like the president of a cor- poration.

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�� ��One of New York's new

pay checks which are

printed, filled in, and

signed by machinery

could not well leave to subordinates and which were impossible of ac- complishment on a ma- chine. Such are the sign- ing of checks and the signing of stock certifi- cates and bonds. The average executive accus- tomed to the signing of papers, cannot, without fatigue, attach his name to more than twenty-five hundred in a day. In these times, when govern- ments and corporations issue bonds representing millions upon millions of dollars, and have pay- rolls carrying thousands upon thousands of names, the task of signing a name in some cases has become an indescribable drudgery. Yet it must be done by re-

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��sponsible persons whose time is especial- ly valuable.

One of the greatest corporations in the world is the municipality of New York. It has more than ninety thousand em- ^ p oyees receiving more than

one hundred and five million dollars in wages and salaries in the course of a year. In 1915 the finance department of this corporation intro- duced a method of filling.out pay checks and signing them by machinery, and thus saved seventy-five per cent in cost, and accomplished work formerly requiring more than sixtyofifice-holders.

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���The electxic machine which fills in the checks with the

name and amount at the rate of seventy-five hundred

an hour or about twenty per second

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