If you鈥檝e ever been bothered by the weight of that laptop you lug about on your travels, spare a thought for George Julius. In 1912, he left Australia in search of buyers for his brilliant new invention-a device that would transform a day at the races by taking betting out of the hands of the bookies and entrusting it to an incorruptible machine. Julius took with him a weighty working model of his automatic totalisator, all brass wheels, cogs, wires and weights, housed in a solid redwood cabinet. The model tote, now on display at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, was a winner and soon became a fixture at racecourses around the world.
AUSTRALIANS, so it鈥檚 rumoured, will bet on anything with the right number of legs, which is generally four. Each year, on the first Tuesday in November, the entire country grinds to a halt for the duration of the Melbourne Cup, the most prestigious horse race in the country. So perhaps it鈥檚 not surprising that the man who transformed betting around the world came from Australia. What is surprising is that he was an archbishop鈥檚 son who had never been to a racetrack in his life. When he began work on his machine, he had something entirely different in mind.
George Julius was born in England in 1873 and was taken to Australia as a small boy when his father was appointed Archdeacon of Ballarat, a gold-mining city in inland Victoria. By day, the archdeacon was occupied with diocesan business, but when work was over he headed for the little workshop at the back of his house and tinkered with broken clocks. Young George clearly had the same sort of bent-for mechanics if not for religion-and when the family decamped from Ballarat to the bishop鈥檚 palace in Christchurch, New Zealand, George studied railway engineering at the local university.
Advertisement
At 23 he returned to Australia, to a job as locomotive engineer for Western Australian railways. Like his father, he was hooked on solving mechanical problems, even in his spare time. So in 1906, when the losers in a local election complained of irregularities in the voting, he built an automatic vote-counting machine that ruled out any possibility of vote rigging. It worked, but then a change in the voting system made the machine redundant.
Reluctant to abandon his invention, Julius decided it could be adapted to solve a problem that had bedevilled the racing world for years: doing the sums for the tote. The tote was a betting system invented in the late 1860s in France, where it was known as the pari mutuel. Unlike a bookmaker, who quotes odds in advance on each horse, the tote pools all the bets and shares out the pot among the winners in proportion to the size of their bet, minus taxes and the operator鈥檚 commission. The tote had grown so popular that the logistics of running it were getting out of hand.
Punters wanted to know the likely payout if their horse won-which depended on how many people had placed bets on the same horse. Keeping track of this figure was near impossible. Worse still, at the end of the race an army of clerks had to calculate how much to pay the winners. With so many people placing bets right up to the off, the race was often over before they had finished their sums. This gave dodgy operators the opportunity to fiddle the figures. The delay also meant that serious punters who bet the winnings from one race on the next couldn鈥檛 get their bets down in time: they were still waiting for their money when the horses left the starting gates.
Julius wanted to make the whole process automatic, fast and tamper proof, from the placing of the bet through to the division of the winnings. This was a monumental task when as many as a million bets might be placed on any one race.
Tote on tour
By 1912, and now based in Sydney, Julius was ready to take his model tote on tour looking for customers. The next year, his first full-size totalisator was installed at Ellerslie Park racecourse in Auckland, New Zealand, where it occupied an entire building. The machine looked a chaotic collection of cogs, pulleys and vast lengths of bicycle chain. In fact it was an efficient real-time data processor. Entirely mechanical, it was driven by cast-iron weights hoisted to the top of the building before the meeting. The bets taken by each operator were fed to an adder, which passed the information-identifying the horse and the size of the bet-to the centralised totalisator, which computed data coming in from dozens of adders. The totalisator in turn drove a series of indicators which displayed the amount of money riding on each runner.
By this time Julius senior was His Grace the Anglican Archbishop and Primate of New Zealand. Inevitably the machine set tongues wagging. The archbishop鈥檚 mechanical skills were famous, and his inspection of the totalisator on its first day of operation prompted speculation about who had really invented the great machine: perhaps it was the cleric, people whispered, although he could hardly admit to it.
George Julius returned to Sydney and set up Automatic Totalisators Limited, which sold tote machines to every big racetrack in the world. Julius and his engineers, including his son Awdry, continually refined the tote. The mechanically powered machines were quickly adapted to run on electricity. A little later came automatic ticket machines, which gave the punter a receipt and simultaneously sent a signal to the totalisator to register the bet. In 1927, Awdry came up with a mechanism that automatically calculated and displayed the odds.
The company continued to build mechanical totes of ever increasing sophistication until the 1960s, when electronics entered the equation. In 1966, 20 years after George Julius had died, his company developed the first computerised tote. But his original invention soldiered on. The last surviving Juliusmachine was in operation at Harringay greyhound stadium in London until its closure in 1987.
Julius is almost invariably associated with horse racing-yet he had a distinguished career in science and became the first head of the Australian government鈥檚 research organisation, now the CSIRO. And despite his intimate knowledge of the betting system, when he had a flutter himself he had no system at all. Instead, remarked The Winner in 1915: 鈥淗e bets in the most unscientific manner, by picking a horse whose form he knows nothing of but whose name pleases his fancy.鈥�