Tote board

His father, Churchill Julius, an Anglican Bishop, had campaigned, in the early years of the twentieth century, against the iniquities of gambling using totalisators and its damage to New Zealand society.

Bishop Churchill was himself an amateur mechanic, with a reputation for fixing clocks and organs in parishes he visited.

Initially, George Julius was attempting to develop a voting calculating machine for the Australian government, to automatically reduce the instances of voter fraud and create a cheat-free political environment.

Totalisators have been superseded by general purpose computers running specialised wagering software such as Autotote.

The method was widely used in the Australian, New Zealand and American horse-racing industries and for greyhound racing in the UK, although there were other installations in countries as diverse as France, Venezuela and Singapore.