Patent Grant
- When
- 1887
- Where
- United States
The first two patents for the comptometer were granted on July 19, 1887, and October 11, 1887, establishing legal protection for the key-driven calculator.
The first two patents were granted on July 19, 1887, and on October 11, 1887. The passages do not specify what subject matter these patents covered or where the grants were issued. The comptometer's key-driven mechanism, in which each key adds or subtracts its value to the accumulator as soon as it is pressed, made the machine extremely fast, but commercial success was not immediate: it took almost three years to sell the first hundred machines.
Sources
- Comptometer Wikipedia, revision of 2026-08-30
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.