Felt & Tarrant Mfg. Co. had been a manufacturer of adding machines since 1895 when it branched out in 1955 to offer the Comptometer, a dictation machine. The Comptometer recorded on a wide belt like the Dictaphone Dictabelt introduced several years earlier, but instead of cutting grooves it recorded magnetically. Its chief advantage was captured in its trade name Erase-O-Matic; unlike the Dictabelt, the Comptometer belt allowed the correction of dictation errors. Wax dictation cylinders had allowed erasing and reusing the entire cylinder by shaving off a layer of wax, but the Comptometer belt went further by allowing errors to be selectively erased simply by backing up and rerecording over the mistake. The entire belt could be erased by holding a bar magnet against it. Like the Dictabelt, the Erase-O-Matic belt could be folded and mailed in an envelope (Felt and Tarrant 1955).