This Day in Pop Culture for November 4

1879: Ka-Ching! The First Cash Register

James Jacob Ritty opened his first saloon in Dayton, Ohio in 1871 and billed himself as a “dealer in pure whiskies, fine wines and cigars.” While his business was successful, Ritty discovered that some of his employees were pocketing customer’s money instead of depositing the cash. For years he struggled to find a way to better record his cash transactions.

While on a steamship trip to Europe in 1878, Ritty was fascinated with a mechanism that counted how many times the ship’s propeller made a full circle. When he got home, he and his brother began working on the first cash register and on this day in 1879 the device was patented as “Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier.”

Soon, the pair opened a small factory manufacturing cash registers but kept the saloon open as well. The second business wasn’t as successful and created too much stress for the Rittys. The brothers sold the second business to a group of investors who created the National Manufacturing Company which was renamed The National Cash Register Company in 1884 and today is better known as NCR. (Main image: Wikimedia)

2005: ‘Chicken Little’ Saved the…Studio?

Since 1995, Disney had enjoyed large profits with their co-production deal with Pixar, but that deal was set to expire in 2006. Pixar’s computer animated films were successful, but Disney’s traditional hand-drawn animation were failing. Some people began to suspect that audiences were no longer interested in hand-drawn films and preferred computer animation, but that really wasn’t the case. Pixar’s storytelling was just better.

There was a lot of pressure put on Disney’s Chicken Little when it opened in theaters on this day in 2005. Not only was it Disney Animated Studios’ first fully computer-animated film, but it also followed a string of underperforming films (Fantasia 2000, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet and Home on the Range).

Loosely based on the famous folk tale, this story centered around Cluck (voiced by Zach Braff) who was a nervous wreck and would often alert his town of Oakey Oaks of some impending doom only to find that he had been mistaken. After too many “false alarms” the townspeople no longer believed a word that Cluck said. And then it happened. He had discovered an UFO. After telling his outcast friends Abby Mallard (Joan Cusack), Runt (Steve Sahn) and Fish Out of Water (Dan Molina) the group had to then convince the town.

The movie also featured the voice talents of Garry Marshall, Amy Sedaris, Don Knotts, Fred Willard, Catherine O’Hara, Patrick Stewart, Wallace Shawn, Patrick Warburton, Adam West and Harry Shearer.

While not a runaway hit nor highly praised by film critics, Chicken Little managed to make significant income for the company.