1913
George Julius’ totalisator machine
The lucky shop
The automatic totalisator designed by Australian George Julius changed gambling profoundly all over the world by taking some of the human element out of losing the family’s shopping money with the SP bookmaker. This is a scale working model of a machine designed to record bets and calculate the changing odds and dividends at the racecourse.
Parimutuel betting was invented by the Spanish bookmaker Josep Oller i Roca in 1867. The parimutuel system pools all the bets on a particular race and totals them up, and thus the odds are set by the collective wisdom of the punters. The house takes a fixed percentage.
The parimutuel system was eagerly adopted by punters and SP bookmakers. Oller i Roca went into the nightclub business and founded the Moulin Rouge and then the Paris Olympia.
In Australia, a parimutuel betting shop was known as a ‘tote’ – short for ‘totalisator’, based on the machine that calculated the odds. The most famous of them all was the Collingwood Tote, which was owned by John Wren.
Born Irish, poor and Catholic, Wren left school at the age of twelve. He showed an aptitude for gambling and opened his totalisator in 1893 at 136 Johnston Street, Collingwood. The front of the building was a teashop; at the back was a lumberyard with no wood. It was one of the most notorious buildings in Melbourne and is now a much-loved venue for live music.
Wren added to his reputation with public generosity to the church, the Collingwood Football Club and the poor. After he had been warned off racetracks, he bought his own – and then motoring tracks and public halls throughout Melbourne and as far afield as Brisbane. He closed his tote in 1907.
George Julius invented his automatic totalisator machine in 1908 to count election ballots. The government didn’t much care for it but he found another client base. ‘I set to work on a machine that would permit the simultaneous addition, give instantaneous records, and would satisfy the requirements of any racecourse,’ he later explained.
The first machine was installed at Ellerslie Racecourse outside Auckland, New Zealand, in 1913. It was the size of a room. The Ellerslie tote was the largest calculating machine in the world until the first generation of mainframe computers were built after World War II.
Julius’s company, Automatic Totalisators Limited, was one of the most successful Australian businesses for 50 years. He was the first chairman of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (later the CSIRO).
By 1970, almost every racetrack in the world was using a version of an ATL tote. Shortly thereafter, the first computers came on the scene, and within ten years they had superseded the totalisator.