3701 Forest Park Blvd., St. Louis (Independent City), Missouri. County/parish: St. Louis.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places November 25, 2005. NRIS 05001328.
1 contributing building.
Standard Adding Machine Company was founded in the early 1890s (first records are from 1892) in Illinois and was the first company to (successfully) release a 10-key adding machine. The machine was a breakthrough for its time because it dramatically modernized computing. Earlier key driven adding machines, like the comptometer, featured eight or more columns of nine keys, which made them cumbersome and costly and their operators prone to mistakes. The 10 keys were set on a single row.
The invention won an international grand prize during the 1904 World's Fair and was heralded as a "modern life preserver" in an office journal.
(read more...)National Park Service documentation: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/63821057