This page relates to pieces of equipment extracted from old tote systems which I consider to be museum pieces and have proven to be of some interest to museums and educational institutions.
Sir George Julius, the founder of the Australian companies Julius Poole & Gibson Pty Ltd and Automatic Totalisators Ltd, invented the world's first automatic tote , which was installed at Ellerslie Racecourse in New Zealand in 1913. Automatic Totalisators grew to be a monopoly exporting totalisator systems throughout the world.
I worked on Automatic Totalisator's first sell pay computer tote system that was installed in Brisbane. This system superseded an electromechanical totalizator which was a descendant of the original invention. I was impressed by the craftsmanship and the ingenuity of this old system, parts of which dated back to circa 1926. I saw one of these totalizator systems bulldozed and realised that this history could easily be lost. Along with peers I started to save shaft adders from the oldest totalizator at Ipswich. The shaft adders would be analogous to part of the central processing unit in modern day terminology.
I found considerable interest in these shaft adders by museums and educational Institutions resulting in many donations. One of the professors accepting a donation remarked that he had seen a model of Babbage's analytical engine and that the shaft adder reminded him of it.
If any museum or other body is interested in a donation we still have several shaft adders
left. The dimensions of the shaft adders are 40cm by 46cm by 36cm and they weigh 21 Kg. each.
To find out more about this history have a look at the following links.
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The largest of these mechanical / electro mechanical installations that I am aware of was in Longchamps France in 1928 with 273 terminals. Have a look at the chronology of the early installations.
To read about the way these mechanical and electro mechanical systems differed from adding machines of the time see extracts of a paper presented by George Julius to the Institution of Engineers Australia in 1920. These were multi user systems.
An electro mechanical system was built and tested in Sydney Australia capable of 250,000 sales per minute from 900 terminals. George Julius referred to this system in his address to the Institution of Engineers Australia.
See a newspaper reporter's description of an electro mechanical totalisator installation in Miami in 1932.
The company that manufactured these mechanical and electro mechanical systems also developed the world's first electronic totalisator system, which was installed in New York.
There is also some information on other electronic totalisator installations. The Brisbane system was a duplex Digital Equipment Corporation PDP11 based totalisator installed in Brisbane Australia in 1978.
The Powerhouse Museum - Located in Sydney Australia
The Queensland Museum - Located in Brisbane Australia
AMOL - Australian museums on line
NZmuseums - New Zealand museums on line
The Computer Conservation Society
The Australian Computer Museum Society has a reference to these systems. Look at Exhibition highlights - Julius totalisator
WWW Virtual Center - History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
The Virtual Museum of Computing
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