The pioneer railways employed paper slips for passenger tickets, and these were laboriously written out, dated and numbered in pen and ink. It was Thomas Edmondson who devised the cardboard ticket, and the efficient and simple ticket numbering and dating machines, and Edmondson's successors at their works in Manchester to-day supply ticket printing, numbering and dating plant to railways throughout the globe. It is a big jump from the early ticket printing machines to the modern electrically-driven equipment that turns out 10,000 perfectly printed tickets per hour. Almost equally marked are the improvements effected in ticket-dating and issuing machines, yet the basic principle of these remains the same as that of the pioneer equipment of Thomas Edmondson's time. If you are ever fortunate enough to visit Britain, in the Lancaster Museum there is a well-preserved specimen of an original Edmondson wooden dating-machine, with unprotected jaws—a feature of early presses that disappeared in 1862.