NEW PRODUCTS: Mechanical Office

The drafty halls of Manhattan’s Grand Central Palace echoed last week with the whir of a thousand mechanical monsters, infernally clever and incredibly dexterous. It was the 40th National Business Show, where the booming U.S. business-machine industry proudly exhibited its newest laborsaving, cost-cutting gizmos.

The industry had reason to be proud. It had boosted its prewar sales rate of $270 million to $900 million last year, in 1948 expects to gross $1 billion for the first time in its history. The soaring wages of office help, plus the growing complexity of keeping tax, payroll deductions and other records, were driving U.S. offices to mechanize as fast as possible.

Nevertheless, the sellers’ market for the industry was about over, and as one observer cracked: “What we need now is an automatic salesman.” Manufacturers were rapidly catching up with their once huge backlog of orders. Burroughs had already trimmed prices and competition was getting so keen that one maker said: “From now on, production is going to be tied to incoming orders, instead of deliveries being tied to production.”

To lure more orders, the show had many an improved model of an old machine. Example: International Business

Machines’ electronic calculating punch now does multiplication, cross-addition, cross-subtraction and division electronically for the first time in business-machine history. The show also had many other new gadgets. Among them: ¶Dictaphone has a light (20-lb.), portable, plug-in model ($350) which records 15 minutes of dictation on envelope-sized plastic belts, so light that five can be mailed in a 3¢ envelope. ¶SoundScriber’s dictating machine ($637.69) has a wafer-thin, Vinylite plastic record which can be erased and used over again by putting it in a machine which heats and whirls it for 29 seconds. ¶Thomas Mechanical Collator Corp., of New York City, has a machine whose metal fingers simultaneously snatch sheets in proper sequence from as many as five piles, staple them for distribution. ¶ International Business Machines’ master clock keeps all electric clocks in a building on time, even those plugged into ordinary sockets. It corrects them every hour by an electronic impulse which it sends out over the building’s power line.