There is a special interest in the date of this invention, for it marks exactly the half-way point in the fifty years of typewriter history. The second quarter century of this period, which begins with the advent of the decimal tabulator, has seen the typewriter extend its range to every form of writing or combined writing and adding formerly done by the pen. The Gorin Tabulator was exactly what its name implies--a decimal tabulator. It wrote columns of figures--anywhere on the page and as many as the page would hold--with the same speed as ordinary, line-by-line writing. The decimal tabulator brought the carriage instantly to the exact point in every column where the next line of writing began, whether units, tens, hundreds or millions, as illustrated in the following example: 340721 5 3 721 55 856 29 8 06 7382 767 952 77 94006 9 763 85 73 86 573 95 00 2099 142 345 48 050 66 9282384650 4 356 758 1 396 722 00 5857205 67 954 678 500 800 00 With the appearance of the first tabulator, the typewriter began to invade new fields which hitherto had been entirely beyond its reach. In some of the Old World countries the decimal tabulator actually took the lead in blazing a path for the writing machine. In these countries there survived for many years a certain prejudice against the typewritten letter, but this prejudice did not extend to form and tabular work, and the first machines purchased by countless business houses in England, France, Italy and elsewhere were tabulating typewriters. This seems like a reversal of the natural order, but the final result was the same. The typewriter, once introduced, soon came into use for every kind of writing.