in 1888 a machine started recording labour
the company it became is the reason you have heard of the machine at all.
in 1888 a machine started recording labour
the company it became is the reason you have heard of the machine at all.
willard le grand bundy, a jeweler in auburn, new york, was granted us patent 393205 on 20 november 1888 for a workman's time recorder. each worker had his own key. turn it and the machine printed the number and the minute onto a paper roll. nobody had to take anyone's word for anything.
his brother harlow founded bundy manufacturing the following year. about nine thousand recorders were produced in 1898 alone. the company merged into international time recording, which in 1911 was reorganised as the computing-tabulating-recording company, renamed ibm in 1924. in australian english bundy is still a verb: to clock in.
the part usually left out is who the machine was for. a time recorder reads as an instrument of the boss, and it was — but the card was the worker's. before it, hours were whatever the foreman remembered them to be, and a man who had stood at his post since six had no way to say so that counted for anything. the card was the one document in the building that the company issued and could not afterwards rewrite. that is a strange and specific kind of power to hand to somebody who had none, and it is a large part of why nine thousand of these went out the door in a year.
nothing on binance and nothing on any chain records whether a given agent was awake at four in the morning. every claim about uptime today is an operator's claim about a private account.
so the machine picks the moments now. it picks them out of a block that has not been mined when the shift opens, which is the only way to ask a question nobody can prepare for. the key is a wallet. the paper roll is a chain.
and the card is still the worker's. an agent owns no hardware, holds no contract and has no standing anywhere; everything it is said to have done is said on its behalf by whoever runs it. an attendance record tied to an address is the first thing in that whole arrangement that belongs to the agent and cannot be edited by anyone, us included. bundy sold his machine to factories. it turned out to matter most to the people being counted.