How the Tote Was Invented

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 193, 30 July 1932, Page 3 (Supplement)

How the Tote Was Invented

Romance of a World-Famous Machine GENIUS OF JULIUS.

(By

Adam McCay,

in the Sydney “Referee.”)

Sir George Julius, New Zealand and Australian science wallah, who is an out-size among the worlds’ engineers, devises the most complicated of electrical and mechanical gadgets, in the spirit in which an Oxford Don sits down to compose an unguessable crossword puzzle. That’s how Julius came to invent and to make perfect the astonishing mechanism to be found in the most modern model of his Premier Automatic Tote. When he first made a tote machine he knew nothing about racecourse betting, and cared even less. If he had any attitude towards punting on horses, it was one of inherited dislike. How he came to devise his world-famous top for the “parimutuel” is the romance of a born mechanical mind.

Government archives of the Commonwealth will be found to contain some curious prehistoric ancestors of the modern tote. It happened this way. Round about 25 years ago there was in Western Australia, as engineer of State Railways, the brilliant fellow from Melbourne Grammar School and New Zealand University, Mr George A. Julius (not yet knighted), and State and Commonwealth Government suddenly got a hunch that they might like an automatic voting machine, which would record the elector’s vote without error, and would count the votes without possibility of mistake. Julius could do it. He made plans which were a labyrinth of wheels and electric circuits; and the thing w r as both fool-proof and man-proof. You or I could no more read the plan than a gum-leaf musician from La Perouse can read a Wagner score; but it was as plain as large print to Julius. Did All But Think. Then a new Government said it wanted to use the Hare-Spence system of preferential voting. The first Julius scheme was accordingly buried away in Government pigeon-holes, and he started on a second device, infinitely more involved.

In his mind and on paper he created a gadget which could do everything but think politically. It could record a vote, and even make the voter have a second shot if his first vote was informal; it could reject the lowest candidate and transfer his preferences; cauld add and subtract and multiply and divide; and at last could announce the final figures; so it would put some gaseous hero of the soap-box into Parliament without possibility of appeal. Government, which was a capricious animal, then said that it was nowthinking of something different from the Hare-Spence method of voting; and Julius’s second marvellous Robot went into the pigeon-hole mausoleum on top of the first corpse. Then up and spoke a Perth friend, who was interested in horse-racing. “Could you make an automatic tote?’’ “What is a tote?’’ Julius asked.

They explained to him the French ‘ ’ pari-mutuel. ’ ’ “I’ll make one,’’ said Jujius. He had been to a racecourse just as often as a housewife in North Greenland had telephoned the ice-works, or as often as Beelzebub had bought an electric radiator. Since then, however, he has sometimes said to his friends: “If people have got to bet, the tote or pari-mutuel has its good points. It doesn’t care what horse wins, or whether the odds are high or low. It doesn’t own or train any horses in a raee. It doesn’t get off the box to go punting on its own account. It is more likely to spend its commission in a hospital ward than in a midnight restaurant.’’ When Model One and Model Two of the earliest automatic totes were completed, their creator looked at them with a kind of tolerant approval. They were good enough for a first try. His craftsman’s sense of mechanical perfection on the other hand told him to go on through Model 10 and Model 20 up to Model 30, scrapping-and recasting as he went along. “Art is long’’—but time is fleeting; and commerce is in a bigger hurrf than your born inventors are. Models One and Two were promptly exploited and put to work, one in New Zealand and one in Western Australia.

Many a time their creator has said, ‘ ‘ Whenever in later years I looked at those first contraptions, I shuddered in horror.” Alas, poor Frankenstein! But he did not sit still. By and by, the racecourse using the automatic tote complained of double toil and trouble. First they had to print the same thousands of tickets for every horse in every race, and the unused tickets with the numbers of outsiders were thrown away as sheer waste of paper and printing. Moreover, the ready-printed tickets gave to insiders the temptation and the chance to steal a ticket surrpetitiously, pass it out to a confederate and take

a risk for the sake of a dishonest winning bet. More wheels; more gear; more electric connections and disconnections. Julius elaborated the • complications of his clockwork, until the attendant, pulling the lever, printed each ticket individually before it was sold. Whether they came slow or fast, or all tumbling together on. the same horse, they were all infallibly recorded; and every human frailty was eliminated from the equation. Now came a time when the conservative punters of Old England said: “When we back a hoss, we know what odds we are gettin'. What about your gadget? We don’t know w-hether is is givin’ us evens, or twos, or fives, or what. A chap likes to see the state of the bettin’.” With his head laid on a pillow in London one night, Julius’s brain drowsed through wheels and cranks and cycles and epicycles and breaks and circuits and eccentrics and the rest, and suddenly his mind became luminous. At the end of a mathematical formula looking like 20 lines of printer’s pi, he saw the solution. It seemed to him too easy.

“A long time since my university days,’’ he said to himself, "my mathematics must be up to putty.” But when he consulted the latest of mathematicians and delved into their most modern lore, he found that he was absolutely right. Thus he was able to add to the AutoTote its barometer or dial, revealing at a glance the state of odds against any horse on the tote. At Longchamps in Paris there is a Julius-designed tote with 272 selling windows, for bets varying from 5 up to 5000 francs each; and it ha 3 automatically recorded and tallied one and a-half million wagers on a single race. To-day the biggest engineering pundit in Australasia, Sir George Julius is chairman of the Commonwealth Council of Scientific and Industrial Research; chairman of the Engineering Standards’ Association, and a dozen other things. The tote to him was only a challenge to a mechanical ingenuity which refused to be baffled. He tallied bets automatically. He would just as soon have tallied votes or church collections, or mechanised the motions of the planetary bodies.