Cash carrier

[1] The earliest type was a two-piece hollow wooden ball which ran along sloping rails, carrying cash and sales docket or receipt.

His invention soon attracted the interest of other shopkeepers, and in 1882 along with Meldon Stephen Giles, the Lamson Cash Carrier Company was incorporated in Boston.

Lamsons offered two main types of system: the "Perfection" and the high-level "Preferred" where there was a "drop point" at the sales counter.

The first shop to use the Lamson cable system was the Boston Store in Brockton (owned by James Edgar), which was founded in 1890.

The best late survivor was at Joyners General Store in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, but the building burned down on New Year's Day, 2004.

An 1898 account of a pneumatic tube system installed in Kirkcaldie & Stains department store in Wellington, New Zealand, states:In the basement is a half horse-power Crossley Bros. gas engine, which works a rotary blower, and this in turn supplies the compressed air required for the whole of the system.

A customer, we will say, in the dress department makes a purchase, and hands the saleswoman a sovereign in payment of a bill for 15s 6d.