Transcript
Introduction
Charles Schwab summarized Frick to an interviewer in the 1930s. "No man on earth could get close to him or fathom him. He seemed more like a machine without emotion or impulses. Absolutely cold-blooded. He had good foresight and was an excellent bargainer. His assets were that he was a thinking machine, methodical as a comptometer, accurate, cutting straight to the point, the most methodical thinking machine I have ever known." John D. Rockefeller said he had the soul of a bookkeeper, that he seemed to earn money like many pursue athletic awards.
Okay, so that is from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Henry Clay Frick: The Life of the Perfect Capitalist and it's written by Quentin R. Skrabec, Jr. So there's actually a word in that intro that I was not familiar with, I had to look it up, and that's that word "comptometer." So in case you don't know what it is, it says the comptometer was the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator, patented in the United States by Dorr E. Felt in 1887. And it says, although the comptometer was primarily an adding machine, it could also do subtractions, multiplications and division.