George Julius

George Alfred Julius was the founder of Julius Poole & Gibson Pty Ltd and Automatic Totalisators Ltd, and invented the world's first automatic totalisator.

He was born in Norwich, England on 29 April 1873. Shortly afterwards his family emigrated to Victoria when his father was appointed Archdeacon for the diocese of Ballarat. From an early age, George's mechanical inclination was obvious to his parents and he often helped his father to fix clocks.

In 1890, he enrolled in a BSc(Mechanical Engineering) degree course at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand. Because of the contemporary boom in railway construction, he specialised in railway engineering and was the first such engineering student to graduate from this university.

Julius's professional career began in 1896. He travelled to Western Australia to accept an appointment as assistant engineer on the staff of the Locomotive Department, Western Australian Government Railways. He worked for the Department for eleven years and was promoted to chief draughtsman and then engineer in charge of tests. In 1898, he married Eva O'Connor and they had three sons; the eldest Awdry Francis (born 1900) was later to become a partner in his father's firm.

While working for the Government Railways, George Julius conducted a series of tests on timber and wrote two learned papers on Western Australian hardwoods. This research led to a job offer from Allen Taylor & Co Ltd, a timber company in Sydney, as part-time engineer. Julius accepted this offer in 1907.

In whatever spare time he had, George Julius worked on the design for an automatic totalisator. Helped by two of his sons, he built a prototype. However, the automatic totalisator was not originally conceived as a betting machine, but as a mechanical vote-counting machine. When the Government rejected the voting machine concept, George Julius adapted it as a racecourse totalisator.

The first installation of the totalisator was in New Zealand in 1913 and subsequent orders kept the firm of Julius Poole & Gibson solvent throughout the depression.

One of the great contributions made by George Julius to the advancement of Australian technology resulted from his appointment, in 1926, as chairman to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). He lobbied for development of primary production and solution to issues in such areas as food storage and food preservation. Later, he turned his attention to issues in secondary production such as aeronautics and electronics. During World War II, he served on the Central Inventions Board, the Australian Council for Aeronautics (as chairman) and the Army inventions Directorate.

Sir George Julius (he was knighted in 1929) remained active as a committee representative until his death on 28 June 1947.