Burroughs Moon-Hopkins M 200 (Class 7)

Invoicing machine with multiplication body

ca. 1953

The Moon-Hopkins invoicing machine was designed by American Hubert Hopkins in St. Louis in 1902 and introduced as a patentable machine. John C. Moon offered to finance the production of the machine and founded the Moon-Hopkins Company in 1903: inventor and financier thus gave the machine its name. However, for patent reasons (patent application in 1903), production of the machines could not begin until after the patent right was granted in 1912. The main patent was filed in 1906, but was not granted until 1920. From 1923, the Burroughs Adding Machine Company acquired the rights to the machine and manufactured and distributed it until about 1960. It should be noted in particular that the essential design of the machine was never changed. The machine was a combination of a calculator and a typewriter. Modern until the end was the multiplying mechanism for the generation of the factors: It consisted of a multiplication block (cf. Bollée and Millionaire), so that for each digit of a multiplier only two machine operations (for ones and tens of the product) were necessary. The calculations were thus performed relatively quickly. Technically obsolete at a very early stage was the typewriter. It was a Remington with a bottom stop. It was disadvantageous in that what was written was only visible after the platen had been opened. The mechanical processes involved in calculations were considerably more complicated than those of the familiar multiplying machines, which worked by means of successive addition, mainly because of the need to write all the values on a form. This machine is presumably the model 200.