A little over a century ago, Dayton, Ohio was the U.S. city with the most patents per capita. Known as “the City of a Thousand Factories,” Dayton churned out a staggering variety of products but also was a center for innovation.
And the cash register was a critical invention that would allow Dayton to forever change American industry.
Who Invented the Cash Register?
The big names we associate with this are John H. Patterson and National Cash Register (later NCR), the company he founded.
But Patterson and NCR aren’t where the story starts, as he wasn’t the one who actually invented the cash register.
Instead, that honor goes to James Ritty, a Dayton saloonkeeper who conceived of the cash register as a method to curtail the persistent problem of employees stealing money from their businesses.
Image courtesy of Dayton Metro Library
This was the first cash register that Ritty developed along with brother John in 1879, a rather crude and inaccurate machine that didn’t even have a cash drawer.
Further iterations would improve upon the original effort, and the full-text of the patent he received on November 4, 1879 is available in its entirety online.
Ritty soon needed a larger space for production than the second floor apartment above his saloon at 10 South Main St, which is pictured below.
Image Courtesy of Dayton Metro Library
This is the factory building where the first cash registers were produced and sent to market. (Other sources suggest that Ritty actually set up shop here in 1881.) Despite Ritty’s ingenuity and foresight, his new business did not enjoy much success.
Patterson Makes Ritty’s Cash Register Big Business with NCR
In 1883, local coal dealer John H. Patterson became interested in Ritty’s cash register, and the rest would be history when he assumed primary ownership of the business previously known as “James Ritty’s New Cash Register and Indicator” and renamed it to the National Cash Register Company (NCR).
But before Patterson revolutionized practices in factory design, employee welfare, community relations, and more from NCR’s legendary corporate campus around Main and Stewart Streets, he got his business started in another part of town.
Image Courtesy of Dayton Metro Library
Pictured above is the Callahan Power Building which stood in the middle of downtown on Main Street just north of Third. It was likely constructed in the late 1870s and built “on spec” rather than purpose-built for a particular company, which was common for these types of industrial lofts at the time.
The lines in the image indicate how much space in the building was occupied by NCR at the different years. You can see from the years that the firm was expanding greatly, and soon it looked beyond the crowded downtown and to a location where it would have much more room to grow.
In 1888 it would move south to its more familiar location, by which point the company employed 220 people. From here the firm’s growth would continue to proceed at a blistering pace as NCR became not only a dominant force in Dayton, but also throughout the United States and even globally.
For more on NCR’s history beyond this point, I have a detailed chapter on NCR and its journey from Ritty’s humble beginnings to Patterson’s industrial juggernaut to its eventual decline in my new book Lost Dayton, published by The History Press in 2018. View Lost Dayton on Amazon.
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