The Cash Register: Two Patents, Two Partners, and a Smithsonian Replica

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 1, 2026

James Ritty patented the cash register in 1879 with his brother, then patented a second version in 1883 with an entirely different man — a patent already assigned to the buyer before it was even granted. The machine now shown as the original, in the Smithsonian's own collection, is labeled in the museum's own words “possibly a replica.”

The 1879 patent, and the brother who filed it

James Ritty ran a saloon in Dayton, Ohio, and believed his bartenders were pocketing cash meant for the till. The origin story told in nearly every retelling has him on a transatlantic steamship in 1878, watching a mechanical counter that tracked the ship's propeller revolutions, and recognizing that the same kind of device could track money instead of rotations. Back in Dayton, he worked through several prototypes with his brother John Ritty, described in period accounts as the mechanic of the two.

Their joint application, filed March 26, 1879, became U.S. Patent 221,360, “Improvement in Cash Register and Indicator,” granted November 4, 1879. The patent names James and John Ritty as co-inventors and lists no assignee — the two brothers owned it outright. Its own language describes the mechanism as a series of numbered keys from five to one hundred cents, each connected to a disk-based recording wheel and an index dial with a moving indicator hand, with a bell that sounds only once a key is fully pressed. A spiral “convolute spring” let the indicator reverse direction cleanly when a lower amount followed a higher one, instead of having to cycle forward through every value in between.

The patent also cites an earlier filing, crediting “United States Patent to McNary, dated May 17, 1870” for the construction of the numbering disks themselves — while stating plainly that detail “forms no part of our invention.” Even the patent the Rittys are credited with inventing acknowledges, on its own first page, a nine-years-earlier mechanism it built on rather than originated.

A second patent, with a different John, already sold

Running a saloon and a cash register workshop at the same time wore on Ritty. In 1881, he sold his interest in the cash register business to a group of investors that included Jacob H. Eckert, a Cincinnati china and glassware merchant, and the Patterson brothers, John and Frank. Eckert organized the operation as the National Manufacturing Company.

A second patent application followed on February 15, 1882, granted January 30, 1883 as U.S. Patent 271,363, “Cash register and indicator.” James Ritty is listed again as an inventor — but his co-inventor this time is John Birch, not his brother. No biographical record for Birch beyond the patent itself turned up in the sources checked for this guide; he appears to have been connected to the business rather than to the Ritty family. The patent's assignee line names Jacob H. Eckert directly, meaning that by the time this second patent was granted, Ritty's ownership stake had already been sold for more than a year. The document protected the business its new owner now ran, not an invention Ritty still held for himself.

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How a saloon machine became National Cash Register

Eckert's National Manufacturing Company didn't stay independent long. In 1884, John H. Patterson bought the company outright and renamed it The National Cash Register Company, adding paper-roll receipts and, decades later under engineer Charles F. Kettering in 1906, an electric motor to drive the mechanism Ritty had built by hand.

The company traded under that name for forty-five years before it ever became a federally registered trademark. THE NATIONAL CASH REGISTER COMPANY, Registration No. 0264237, states a first-use-in-commerce date of February 1, 1929 and was registered November 19, 1929, covering “accounting machines, adding typewriters, calculating and computing machines, and registering devices” under International Classes 009 and 016. That specific registration lapsed in 1992, marked “EXPIRED SEC. 9” for a missed renewal — the same gap this series has already found between a product's actual founding and the paperwork that formally claims its name, seen before in Melmac's trademark and PAAS Easter egg dye's. The company itself kept going under newer registrations and a shortened name, NCR Corporation; in 2023 it split again, spinning off NCR Atleos and renaming the remaining business NCR Voyix — a corporate name with no reference to a cash register at all, a century and a half after Ritty's first patent.

How to date a real one

NCR's own factory records, compiled by present-day collectors, turn a bare serial number into an actual manufacture date — a more reliable instrument than the maker's mark alone, which stayed the same across decades of production.

• Try a magnet before anything else. A magnet won't stick to a brass case; it will stick to the cast-iron cases NCR used on its lower-end models. That single test sorts a register into the right material family before any other check matters.
• Look under the drawer for a finish letter. NCR marked its own factory finish on a paper label under the drawer: A for copper-oxidized (a copper tone with blackened detail), B for nickel-plated (silver or chrome-like, rarely found with original plating still intact since it wore through with use), and C for polished, lacquered bronze. A case that doesn't match its own finish letter has likely been stripped and replated.
• Check for an “S” prefix on the serial number. NCR used that prefix for factory-remanufactured units, which were rebuilt and reissued on their own separate dating schedule rather than sold new in the year their base serial number would otherwise suggest.
• Weigh it. A genuine cast brass or bronze case, built from heavy sand molds, is noticeably heavier than it looks. A light case is the first sign of a shell-only reproduction, not a real register that happens to be in poor condition.

The look-alikes

Two different problems show up under this name, and they call for different checks. The first is an authentic NCR case that has been stripped and replated without disclosure — the finish-letter mismatch above is the direct test, and a uniform, unworn finish across the whole case (instead of wear concentrated at the drawer pull, the keys, and the crank on the right edge, where a real clerk's hand would have rested for decades) is a supporting sign the surface is newer than the machine.

The second is a modern decorative object built to look like an antique register rather than function as one. These turn up as home-decor pieces and novelty electronics, sold plainly as reproductions by the maker but sometimes resold without that context. Lighter overall weight, modern fasteners (Phillips-head screws or hex bolts, instead of the slotted screws and period bolts an 1880s–1920s machine would carry), a shell with no internal levers, springs, or racks behind the keys, and crisp, uniform casting instead of the softened detail a century of handling and cleaning leaves behind are the practical tells, in roughly the order a buyer can check them in person.

Where the records disagree

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds an object cataloged as “Ritty Model 1 Cash Register, Possibly a Replica.” Its own record states the machine is either “the Rittys' first machine, or an early replica of it,” credits National Cash Register Company — not James or John Ritty — as maker, and dates its documented history to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, where NCR exhibited it as part of its own corporate heritage display, twenty-five years after the Ritty brothers' actual 1879 patent. The object's own credit line reads “Gift of National Cash Register Company,” not a Ritty descendant or an independent collector. A company that wanted a historical centerpiece for a World's Fair booth, a quarter century after the fact, is not an unreasonable thing to build; it does mean the most visible “first cash register” most people will ever see in person may not be the first one at all.

A second disagreement sits in the record of who actually gets credit for inventing the machine. James Ritty's name appears on both patents, but with two different partners — his brother John Ritty in 1879, and John Birch, a man with no independent biographical record found for this guide, in 1883. Several retellings compress this into a single clean story (“Ritty and his brother invented the cash register”) that is accurate about the 1879 patent and silent about the second one, which is the patent that was actually in force, under new ownership, by the time National Cash Register existed as a company at all.

What one sells for now

No confirmed realized auction price for a specific NCR brass register could be verified for this guide; the auction-result pages that list such figures (LiveAuctioneers, WorthPoint) keep the actual sold price behind a paid membership, and a price-guide site's claim of a specific 2023 Christie's sale for an NCR Model 313 could not be corroborated against any auction house's own records and is left out rather than repeated. A current active listing — an unrestored brass NCR register, serial-tagged, sold as-is — is asking $1,850 or best offer, a genuine current asking price rather than a sale. Separately, a price-guide site's stated ranges for restored, working brass NCR registers run from roughly $1,000 to $3,000 for good condition up to $3,000 to $12,000 or more for excellent, fully functioning examples with their original parts; those figures are a price guide's own estimate, not a verified transaction, and are given here at that weight only.

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For another guide built around a patent granted years after the business it covered had already changed hands, see the pencil eraser patent, sold for $100,000 and thrown out by the Supreme Court. For another business machine built to stop a specific kind of theft at the point of sale, see check protectors, the desk machine built to make a forged check impossible. For another trademark that was federally registered decades after the business it named had already been trading under that name, see Masonite, named after its inventor, not a masonry trade. For another business machine patent race decided by how fast the inventor filed, see the comptometer, the adding machine patent Dorr Felt won in a year while Burroughs waited three. See more Field Guides