Patent no. 388,116 on a "calculating machine".

William Seward Burroughs I (January 28, 1857 – September 14, 1898) was an American inventor, born in Rochester, New York.

William Seward Burroughs was a son of a mechanic, and he worked with machines while growing up. While he was still a small boy, his parents moved to Auburn, New York, where he and his brothers were educated in the public schools. According to the father's desire that his youngest son should choose a gentleman's vocation, young William , after his graduation from high school, entered the Cayuga County National Bank of Auburn as a clerk, where he spent long hours of adding numbers.

At this time he became interested in solving the problem of creating an adding machine. In the bank there had been a number of earlier prototypes, but in inexperienced users' hands, those that existed would sometimes give incorrect, and at times outrageous, answers. The clerk work was not in accordance with the young man's wishes, for he had a natural love and talent for mechanics and the boredom and monotony of clerical life weighed heavily upon him. Seven years in the bank damaged his health and he was forced to resign.

In the beginning of 1880s he was advised by a doctor to move to live in a warmer climate area, and moved to St. Louis, where he obtained a job in a machine shop. These new surroundings, which appealed to him more, hastened the development of the idea he had already in his mind and the tools of his new craft gave him the opportunity to put into tangible form the first conception of the adding machine. Accuracy was the foundation of his work. No ordinary materials were good enough for his creation. His drawings were made on metal plates which could not stretch or shrink by the smallest fraction of an inch. He worked with hardened tools, sharpened to finest points, and when he struck a center or drew a line, it was done under a microscope.

So, he invented a "calculating machine" designed to ease the monotony of clerical work. He was a founder of the American Arithmometer Company (1886), which later became the Burroughs Adding Machine Company (1904), then the Burroughs Corporation (1953) and in 1986, merged with Sperry to form Unisys. He was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He was the grandfather of William S. Burroughs the Beat Generation writer, and great-grandfather of William S. Burroughs, Jr., also a writer.

He died in Citronelle, Alabama and was interred in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.

[edit] Patents

• U.S. Patent 388,116 Calculating-machine. Filed January 1885, issued August 1888.
• U.S. Patent 388,117 Calculating-machine. Filed August 1885, issued August 1888.
• U.S. Patent 388,118 Calculating-machine. Filed March 1886, issued August 1888.
• U.S. Patent 388,119 Calculating-machine. Filed November 1887, issued August 1888.

[edit] External links

• Burroughs Corporation Records Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Collection contains the records of the Burroughs Corporation, and its predecessors the American Arithmometer Company and Burroughs Adding Machine Company.
• William S. Burroughs biography and science resources at The Franklin Institute's Case Files online exhibit
• William Seward Burroughs' Photo & Gravesite
• The Calculating Machines of William Seward Burroughs at site History of Computers and Computing