William Seward Burroughs I was an American inventor born in Rochester, New York and educated in the public school system. He obtained a job in the Boyer Machine Shop.

He invented a “calculating machine” (first patent filed in 1885) designed to ease the monotony of clerical work. He was a founder of the American Arithmometer Company (1886), which later became the Burroughs Adding Machine Company (1904), then the Burroughs Corporation (1953) and in 1986, merged with Sperry Corporation to form Unisys.

Tammy Werner of Unisys hands the Deed of Gift Agreement to John Alviti, Senior Curator at The Franklin Institute. The machine is given by Gail A. Arrington, on behalf of Unisys Corporation, in memory of Joseph H. Arrington.The Franklin Institute shows Burroughs Adding Machine

Grandfather of Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs and great-grandfather of William S. Burroughs, Jr., who was also a writer.

William Burroughts Nike CM The purpose of technology is not to confuse but to serve

Beat luminaries Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, influenced generations of disillusioned outcasts, hippies and punks alike.

1953 semi-autobiographical novel, Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict William S. Burroughs
“They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee suit,” wrote Burroughs in a 1985 essay. “They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”
The Beat writer spent nearly two decades as a heroin addict, traveling the world on his parents’ dime while filling notebooks with what would become his controversial 1959 masterpiece, Naked Lunch, in which Burroughs ripped apart the conventions of linear narrative and dared to write openly — disturbingly so, at times — about his fantasies and homosexuality. Burroughs’ family money and legal connections allowed him to avoid a two-year prison term for manslaughter after killing his  common-law wife, Joan Vollmer.

William S. Burroughs, Jr., died in 1981, at the age of 33, from alcoholism and liver failure.  On September 6, 1951, Billy’s father accidentally shot and killed his mother in a drunken game of ‘William Tell’ in Mexico City. In chapter three of his second novel, Kentucky Ham, Burroughs relates his memory of the day his mother was shot dead, as well as the following reunion with his father after he was freed from a Mexico City prison. While his father stayed in Mexico, Billy went to live with his paternal grandparents – Mortimer and Laura Lee Burroughs, in St. Louis, Missouri.

Blue Oyster Cult Session in late  1976 with a session with famed producer Bruce Dickinson

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Bruce Dickinson “Heavy Metal was a term coined by a journalist actually, and I think it’s from William R. Bourrrough’s novel but that’s a minor detail.” more