[GreenKeys] [External] Re: Backup system for TTY

[Jones, Douglas W]

From: Richard Knoppow [1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com] -- Monday, January 3, 2022 9:12 AM

>     I remember the same set up in a small department store in
> small town Michigan when I was a kid. Baskets running on a system
> of wires. I have no idea of the reason.

Jacobson's Department Store in Ann Arbor, Mi. had such a system.
I recall it from the 1950s when I was a child being taken to buy clothes.

Instead of having separate cash registers at each checkout counter,
the clerk would write up a sales slip, take your money, and put both in
the basket, then pull a trigger cord which would kick the basket up
along the wire to the cashier's desk overlooking the sales floor.

The cashier would take the sales slip, which presumably went to the
accountant who managed the store's books, and then to the inventory
management person who tracked sales and decided when to
re-order.  The cashier made change and sent the cart back down
the wire so the change could be returned to the customer.

Larger stores used pneumatic tubes for the same function.

Back when I was studying the history of voting machines for the book
I wrote a decade ago (Broken Ballots), I found an inventor, Alfred
Gillespie, who (before getting involved with election technology) had
patents on both the wire-and-cart and pneumatic-tube systems:
-- https://patents.google.com/patent/US469014A
-- https://patents.google.com/patent/US617417

He also patented farm equipment and a pencil sharpener, but once
he got involved in voting machines, that seems to have become his
primary focus.

               Doug Jones
               jones at cs.uiowa.edu