This is one of several pages relating to the history of the automatic totalisator, its invention in 1913, the inventor George Julius and the Australian company he founded in 1917 which became a monopoly ( later an oligopoly ) in this field. This page relates the history of the company mentioned above, Automatic Totalisators. This is a history only non commercial page. If you wish to start from the beginning then go to the index .
Copyright © 1997 - 2008 Email - totehis@hotmail.com
Julius Tote Video Clips
The video clips in this section are extracts from a video made by Andrew Keene He produced this video as part of a study made by GLIAS of the Harringay greyhound racing track prior to its closure in 1987. GLIAS (The Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society) is a registered charity devoted to recording and explaining London's fast disappearing industrial history. Charles Norrie from GLIAS, organised the acquisition of this video and copyright approval to use it.
I give thanks to the above for their foresight in recording this history. I have been unable to acquire any video footage from the remnants of Automatic Totalisators, the company that produced these systems. Ironically this footage came from the other side of the world.
The system in these clips is not electronic, it is electro mechanical. This technology existed long before the invention of the electronic computer. The Harringay system was installed in 1930.
In some cases I have edited the original video to get different views of the same equipment into one clip.
There is another source of video of a working Julius totalisator. The film was shot in 1935.
It is titled New tote for Randwick punters. It is available from the Screensound web site.
The title number is 187881.
The copyright owner is Filmworld . You may be able to
attain a private copy of this. It is not possible to attain copyright approval to show this video at the present time.
When you visit the Screensound web site. click on
Search Collection then click The National Collection then enter totalisator
spelt with an s not a z in the Title/keyword box. Finally look for title
number 187881
For some time I have been interested in the sound these systems made.
I have never seen or heard an electro mechanical tote working. Following is
an extract from Tote Topics number 19 July 1968. It describes the sound of an electro
mechanical totalisator as well as comparing it to an early computer totalisator. These film clips provide an excellent example of the sounds these systems made.
Tote Topics was the Automatic Totalisators company magazine.
| Electronic Totalisators II The characteristics of Electronic Totalisators.
|
We have seen that the Electronic Totalisator is entirely different from the electro mechanical
types both as regards its equipment and its characteristics. Let us look at these differences in a little
more detail, because in them we will find the essential features of the Electronic Totalisator, its
place in the entire scene and even the basic reasons for its very existence.
In the machine room of an electro mechanical totalisator there is motion, constant motion, and noise.
With betting in progress, the constant chatter of the escapements blends with the purring of the counters
and the low rumble of the drives to give a quite characteristic sound. This sound, both in intensity
and pitch, indicates to the experienced totalisator operator, even more clearly than his eyes, the
state of the queues outside and the conditions around the selling houses. He scarcely needs a clock, so
accurately is he able to predict from the betting pattern the time to the start of the next race. The
equipment consists of row upon row of shafts and gears and escapement wheels and mechanical counters.
At first sight it seems entirely mechanical as the electrical portions are buried deep
inside.
With the smaller "counter tote" using electromagnetic counters, the pattern changes to that of a telephone
exchange. There is the click of the relays and the clack of the counters as the bets pile up. One is
still left with the impression of a mechanical device with the moving counters and manual operations.
However, the position changes entirely when we go to an Electronic Totalisator. The machine room consists
of one or more rows of silent steel cabinets. Lights blink continually on the front panels of the cabinets
indicating the progress of betting. Every ninety seconds new odds ripple along the boards and with
a staccato burst the high speed printer spews out another page of updated odds and pool figures. Otherwise
all is silent and the lights blink on. The operators move quietly about, occasionally flipping a
switch or pushing a button to stop betting or calculate dividends or complete some similar, but normally
laborious, task in the blink of an eye.
P.J.G.
Neville Mitchell made an audio tape in 2003, about the workings of these electro mechanical systems, for Bob Doran and Bob Moran (yes two Bobs, one Doran one Moran) both interested in the mechanics and restoration of these systems. I have included a couple of extracts here as they can be well visualised in the above video clips.
| The Mystique of these machines |
The mystique of the machines was something I experienced, particularly in Melbourne, not so much in Sydney. The men who operated the four major tracks there had been with these machines since 1936 and on the decommissioning day, I saw emotions that were quite unbelievable. They were seeing the last day of operations with this sort of gear. The strictness with which the engineers ran these systems was somewhat akin to a military operation, they really had a lot of power. They had a lot of routines set down and to be an apprentice in those days was a lot of sweeping the floors and making the tea for a long long time before you actually got your hands on any piece of equipment. And I believe in the early days in Melbourne, if an apprentice was seen with his hands out of his pockets in the machine room, he would get a swift slap around the ears. The same thing applied in New Zealand. I read some stories from there and I actually knew a couple of the engineers and they applied the same very very strict mode of operation on their set-ups. They were extremely proud of these machines and some of them spent all of their, what you would call, idle time in routine maintenance and polishing of brass and things like that, that made these machines absolute showrooms.
In the display of odds and the like, there was a certain evolution. In the very early days the actual readout of the adder was onto a giant drum, probably 600mm in diameter and the digits 0 to 9 were displayed on them and there would be whatever numbers required to display the amount of tickets that were sold on a particular horse. These were enormous machines and beautifully made and I reinstalled one in Thailand back in 1969 and I was quite amazed at the ingenuity of it and how large it was and some of the techniques; they had switching circuits for the decade counting from one digit to the next which were mercury pots, with probably about a 25mm diameter pot 30mm deep that was filled with mercury lying side by side, and then a fork like a span, which was the switch, would dip into it, and that would create the circuit to the next decade. And you can imagine how absolutely accurate that was, there was no chance of a dirty contact or a miss-up in a norm transfer. However when you got these big systems working rather quickly, the building shook a bit!
Neville Mitchell sent me an email on 15 January 2004 which contained the following anecdote -
Did I ever tell you that at Flemington the win place tote could be run with a power shortage, The auxiliary power supply could supply enough power to run the betting circuits, but not enough to run the adder drive motor[s], so a hatch was removed from the floor exposing a wide drive belt, a man would stand on the belt and work it like a treadmill energising the adder input shaft, thus keeping the tote running. Funny how some of the things like the above anecdote come to mind. I was told about this on the day the Flemington tote was taken to the metal recyclers, and I was shown how it worked by Alf Schoffel [ Nick named "snifter" because he alway had a runny nose] Alf went to Melbourne in 1936 for 6 weeks for the installation of Flemington, and was still there in 1975.
To find out more about this system, read Charles Norrie's excellent article titled The Harringay Greyhound Stadium Totalisator and George Alfred Julius
- Thanks to Andrew Keene, GLIAS and Charles Norrie for making these video clips possible.
- Thanks to Bob Plemel for hosting these film clips.
- Thanks to Neville Mitchell for another audio tape, the first is transcribed in Memories of the factory
- Thanks to my younger son, who is no longer 11 as he was when he initially helped with this site, he has now completed first year at University and finds web site work trivial.
Comments and suggestions welcome to
totehis@hotmail.com 
