Preface.
Anyone knowing the meaning of common mathematical terms, such as dividend, product, etc., can learn how to perform on the Comptometer any of the classes of examples explained in this book in a few minutes. It is very easy to learn how, but it is to have skill of the fingers that is most necessary. The Comptometer is not a hand organ or grind stone. Being a key-operated instrument, like the typewriter, it requires considerable practice to render one sufficiently skillful to operate it successfully. Addition requires more practice than anything else. Multiplication requires comparatively little, but care must be taken to follow the methods laid down in the book, because there are other methods which one is apt to stumble onto which are not nearly so rapid. Division is more difficult to learn, but easy to remember, and though it requires more practice than multiplication, it does not require nearly as much as addition. To those who think they are so gifted that they can learn to operate the Comptometer with little or at least much less practice than is necessary for common mortals, we will say, do not undertake to learn the Comptometer at all. You will not succeed. Nothing but faithful practice will enable anyone to become an operator. You may say that you learned to use the typewriter skillfully in a few days, but that is impossible. No one ever did. After a few days' practice one may be able to operate slowly, but not as they would be expected to operate to fill a position as a regular operator. There is nothing in this world worth knowing, no skill worth having, which does not cost study or practice.
The Comptometer requires practice.
A stenographer finds it necessary to be a good typewriter operator and a book-keeper finds it advantageous to be a good Comptometer operator, which he can by using it twenty minutes a day for sixty or eighty days on his regular work.
Overlooking the fact that it takes practice to do anything well which is worth doing, some assume that they are operators before they can "operate" a little bit, and ascribe the resulting inefficiency in the combination (machine and operator) to the machine, when it should be ascribed to the operator, and when a few weeks' use of the machine would remove that inefficiency.
Some not only do not practice long enough, but fail to obtain a correct understanding of the methods for operating, and therefore jump to the conclusion that it is not adapted to their particular work, when there are hundreds using it on precisely the same work at a large saving of time and trouble. We will be glad to write special instructions for anyone who will send us a sample example in their principal work. This book is not intended to give the short cuts on the Comptometer, which can be employed on almost every kind of special work.
