Computer Science

Totalisators: The Longchamp Machine

Securing the contract to provide the totalisator for Longchamp was the pinnacle of success for the young Automatic Totalisators Ltd. The machine was installed in 1927 and kept operating until it was replaced by a computer system in 1973. We would like to eventually have more detailed description of this machine but do not have much information to go on at this stage. (It seems that Longchamp can be spelled Longchamps in English. Here we will keep to the French spelling except in extracts from other documents.)

There is one report that reveals a lot about the machine from an external viewpoint. In 1928, when Winston Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer, the government of the UK was considering making totalisators legal and sent a pair of civil servants to Paris to report on the australian totalisator. Their report is lodged in the Churchill Archives and is reproduced here.

The Paris machine was reported to have only 8 TIMs per distributor and therefore needed 35 escapements in each adder. (ATL in-house journal "Tote Topics" - the April 1967 issue celebrating 50 years of the automatic totalisator.) Although we cannot give a full description of the machine we do have a number of photographs that reveal some details.

Here are some images from an ATL brochure of 1930. These retain their captions. Note that there are 7 sets of ticket machines, some out in the field and one remote set of indicators in the field.

Here are some images from the French National Library, supposedly taken on a special demonstration day before the machine was officially opened. These include two close-ups of the ticket issuing machines. A mystery: the TIMS handle 24 horses yet the displays are for 42 horses. We do not really know what the device at the bottom was used for.