To get an idea of the capacity of this machine, suppose that your income is $1,000,000 a second. At this rate for twenty-four hours a day, with no stops for eating or sleeping, it would take you 352,331,022,041,828,731,333,333,333 years to accumulate a duodecillion dollars. All the hairs on the heads of all human beings, which are supposed to be numberless, are only a small fraction of a duodecillion. This machine has a practical use in adding several sums simultaneously, and takes the place of from ten to a dozen smaller machines. Adding machines are made that figure in English pence, shillings and pounds; in Japanese yen, and in the monetary system of most civilized countries. They will change inches into feet, pounds into bushels, and do other “stunts” that would make the average schoolboy envious when it comes to arithmetic. The most complicated problems of multiplication, division and fractions may be handled with ease on these machines. They have taken a great part in the day’s work of modern business, and it would be hard to imagine how the world’s finance and industry could be handled without them. Adding and calculating machines have become almost as necessary in modern business as the telephone and the typewriter. How are Adding Machines Used? Adding machines may be found at work in all kinds of business places from corner groceries to department stores and manufacturing plants. In the various offices and plants of the Western Electric Company, which are scattered through the country, more than 1,600 machines are in use. Other big users are railroads, banks, mail-order houses, and city, state and government offices. The Bank of France, the Bank of England, and other of the world’s largest financial institutions do the burden of their figure work on adding machines made in the United States. The German post-office uses more than 1,200 machines. There are individual American banks, like the Corn Exchange National Bank of New York, that employ as many as 150 adding machines in their work. [Illustration: ONE OF THE SMALLEST ADDING MACHINES IS ADAPTED FOR USE BY RETAIL MERCHANTS AND OTHERS WHO DO NOT ADD FIGURES OF MORE THAN FIVE DIGITS _Courtesy of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company._] Some surprising uses are found for adding machines. One is used in a Japanese boarding house in California; another is used by a retired Dayton millionaire to count the coupons he clips; the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission uses a machine in fighting the hook-worm; the United States government uses thousands in making census tabulations and in other ways. Others are used by newsboys, egg farmers, housewives, undertakers, dentists, judges in automobile races, and by persons in a thousand different lines of business. Without adding machines the public would be obliged to wait for days for the results of most elections. In this way, the idea of a tired bank clerk came to change the figuring methods of the world.