“The duplicate of the order,” said Edith as she turned away from the counter, after the clerk had punched the value of her purchase out of the credit card she gave him, “is given to the purchaser, so that any mistakes in filling it can be easily traced and rectified.” – Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 1888 The idea that you could merely take a card into a store, swipe it, have the item paid for, and receive a receipt in this fashion was, well, the work of science fiction. Remember, this book was written in 1888, a time in which credit basically only existed as a method for individual stores to enable individual buyers to buy extra items. This novel, Looking Backward, is quite impressive in terms of making predictions about how credit cards work in the modern era, even down to the concept of one receipt for the customer and one receipt for the buyer.
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