The cash register was invented by James Ritty, a saloon owner from Dayton, Ohio, who received a patent for the device in 1879.

He suspected his bartenders were stealing money, and while traveling by steamship in 1878 he studied a device that counted a propeller’s revolutions, which gave him the idea that a similar mechanism could count and record cash transactions.

With his brother John, he built the first sets of models and eventually called it the “Incorruptible Cashier.”

Before this, merchants had relied on tools like the abacus and tally sticks to calculate totals and track debts by hand. Ritty’s machine used keys and a dial to display the sale amount, making it harder for an employee to pocket money without recording the sale, and its face looked somewhat like a clock, with separate hands for dollars and cents.

Ritty found the manufacturing side unprofitable and sold the rights for almost nothing. In 1884, John Patterson bought the business and founded the National Cash Register Company, or NCR.

Patterson improved the design by adding a cash drawer and a bell that rang whenever it opened, which made unrecorded sales harder to hide and doubled as marketing, since a frequently ringing bell made a store sound busy and successful. NCR later added paper rolls for permanent sales records, introduced electric motor-powered registers in 1906, and had sold over a million machines by 1911, exporting them as far as Russia, where they continued to be imported until 1933.

Some NCR machines carried signs like “Money Must Be Registered Before Goods Are Wrapped” as reminders to clerks, and department-store models sometimes gave each clerk a separate drawer to keep individual employees accountable for their own cash.

Cash registers began showing up in stores in the 1880s but didn’t become common until the early 1900s, with small independent grocers among the earliest adopters. By 1915, more than 1.5 million had been sold in the United States, making them standard equipment in most retail businesses.

Adoption looked different elsewhere. Japan began importing registers in 1897, but they were expensive and didn’t fit local business habits, where the abacus was already widely trusted, so in 1913 the company Itoki Shoten developed a homegrown alternative called the Zeni-ai-ki. It skipped calculation entirely and focused purely on preventing theft, since the cash drawer would only open after the clerk wrote the sale on a paper roll inside. It sold more than 10,000 units by 1927 and stayed in use for decades.

Britain had its own unusual design in the J.C. Cox “Double-Sided Till,” built for pubs, which let a coin drop through a visible zigzag of glass panels and trays so both customer and cashier could watch it land in a locked box.

Around 1900, Hines Patent Calculator combined calculating and cash-recording functions while working in the older pounds-and-shillings currency system rather than a decimal one.

There isn’t good evidence that any country flatly rejected cash registers. The real obstacles were cost, unfamiliarity with key operation, and the continued usefulness of existing tools, especially the abacus in Japan.

South Korea introduced laws requiring registers in certain businesses during the 1970s and 1980s.

In the Soviet Union, registers inherited from pre-revolutionary Russia stayed in use and were eventually produced domestically, so there was continuity rather than resistance.

The original Ritty register was donated to the Smithsonian Institution in 1959.

Cash register research also fed into later retail technology, since RCA tested an automatic checkout system in 1972 near Cincinnati, and by 1974 the Universal Product Code had been created, with the first barcoded products sold at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, Ritty’s home state.

Today’s registers range from traditional tills to touch-screen point-of-sale systems and self-checkout machines, including some in Japan that meow or bark when items are scanned.

A number of well-known people worked a register before becoming famous, among them Bing Crosby as a cash boy in Spokane, Bob Hope selling shoes in Cleveland, Faith Hill working every job at a McDonald’s including the register, and Greta Garbo selling hats in Stockholm.