National Business Show

To mail out an ordinary business letter the cost, in cents, is:

Stenographer 12

Postage 2

Letter head 0.4

Envelope 0.4

Typewriter ribbon 0.075

Second sheet 0.06

Carbon paper 0.037

Businessmen who knew that a letter does cost 14.972 cents were the most insistent that their executives and office help attend the 24th yearly National Business Show, which began last week in Madison Square Garden, Manhattan. The place was crowded with men and women studying devices that could save them labor, seconds and mills.*

None of the devices were entirely new. Many were improvements or modifications of older models. Most were things that alert businessmen already owned and up-and-coming executives planned to buy. Some of them:

Underwood Bookkeeping Machines combined the typing of records and mechanical calculating of accounts by a minimum number of processes. One operator does the work of several bookkeepers. Its basis is the Underwood typewriter.

National Accounting Machine, made by the National Cash Register Co. and resembling a cash register with three banks of keys, is adaptable to all kinds of analysis and distribution works, as sales analysis, payroll, cost or expense distribution, purchase analysis, distribution of remittances received, stock & production control, and the like accounting intricacies. Victor and Corona typewriters both portables and both with standard 4-row keyboards, were sold to people who travel or do writing at home. Offices that require extra typewriters occasionally bought them for such emergencies. Victor Adding Machine Co. makes Victors; Coronas have been popular for 20 years. Remington and Underwood also make portable typewriters.

Stenotype is a small machine with 23 keys, with which a stenographer can record 150 to 280 words a minute. She writes with it as she writes shorthand-- phonetically, the words being printed on a strip of paper. Later she transcribes her "notes" into orthoepic correspondence. LaSalle Extension University offered to teach stenotypy.

International Business Machines Corp. showed an electric tabulating and accounting machine that automatically compiled data from "tabulating" cards. These cards bear holes punched according to an office code to represent various factors necessary for bookkeeping. The holes regulate the action of counters on the machine. Governments use this system (called the Hollerith) in census work.

Other bookkeeping machines were the Comptometer, the Add-Index portable electric adding listing machine, Burroughs automatic bookkeeping machine, Monroe calculators and check writers, Langford sales auditors.

For handling letters the Seal-ometer sealed, stamped and counted envelopes; Addressograph stencilled name & address on them; Bircher's Lightning letter opener slit them open.

For storing office records there were safes, filing cabinets, and lockers made by Rand-Kardex, Van Dorn, Diebold, Amberg, Invincible, Berloy and Medart.

"Theoretical one-thousandth of the U. S. dollar.