Lamson (UK)

Lamson (Australia and New Zealand)

Cash Balls

Parcel carriers

Push-car carriers

Rapid Wire

Air-Line

Kick-back

Pneumatic tubes

Lamson publications

William Stickney Lamson was born in Newburyport, Mass. in 1845. He married Marianna Abbot in 1869 and had two sons, William and Frank. After working as a painter and a soldier, he opened a shop in Merrimack Street, Lowell, Mass. in February 1879. (Today in Science History, 13 July.) His first experiment in saving the assistants going to-and-fro between the counter and the cash office is said to have been wrapping the cash in a handkerchief and throwing it! Then he had the idea of using hollow balls rolling along tracks - the Cash Ball system.

By August 1885 his system was in use in several hundred locations in the United States. "The invention is that of an American named Lamson, who perfected his plans two or three years ago, and has by this time amassed a large fortune from his fortunate ingenuity. He was originally a draper, and while engaged in his business gradually worked out the idea which had suggested itself to him in consequence of the number of boys whom he found it necessary to employ in going between the cashier's office and counters where a variety of cheap and miscellaneous goods were sold... So popular has the invention become that at present it has been adopted by four or five hundred drapery establishments in the United States; it is extensively used on the Continent... All the 'cash railways' which have been erected throughout the world are rented from him." (Lurgan Times, 28 Aug. 1885, p. 4)

The Lowell Sunday Sun, 9 June 1963, p. 52, had an article headed "Lowell Inventor's Hollowed-Out Orange Led to World Success." It reported that his daughter-in-law recalled William Lamson breakfasting one morning and digging out the contents of two halves of an orange with a spoon. "Why wouldn't a hollowed-out ball", he mused, "make a good carrier for change to and from the cashier? It could travel over the heads of the crowds!"

William Lamson died in 1912. The New York Sun of 17 August printed the following obituary notice: "He left school at an early age and entered a dry goods store as a salesman, later opening a store of his own. In 1879, while proprietor of a small dry goods store here, he conceived the idea of lessening labor and the confusion incident to receiving cash and making change by his device for the transfer of money. He was a veteran of the Civil War, having served in the Union army for four months in 1864. He was a member of the 272 Descendants of William Lamson, of Ipswich, Mass. Masonic fraternity and joined Kilwinning Lodge of Lowell about twenty-five years ago. In religious life he was affiliated with the Unitarian Church."