Sir George Alfred Julius was an English-born Australian inventor and entrepreneur. He was the founder of Julius Poole & Gibson Pty Ltd and Automatic Totalisators Ltd, and invented the world's first automatic totalisator.
Early years
George Alfred Julius was born in a small house in Bethel Street, Norwich, England,. At that time his father, Churchill Julius, was a curate at St. Giles in Norwich. In 1873 the family moved firstly to the parishes of South Brent and thereafter to Shapwick and Ashcott in Somerset. Later, Churchill Julius became vicar of Holy Trinity, Islington, London; he subsequently accepted the appointment as Archdeacon of Ballarat, Australia and it was to here that the family travelled on the sailing ship "South Australian" in 1884. From an early age, George's mechanical inclination was obvious to his parents and he often helped his father to fix clocks, one of which survives in the tower at St. Michael's, Brent Knoll, although George would have been too young to have assisted with this particular repair! The family moved to New Zealand when Churchill Julius was nominated to the Diocese of Christchurch in 1889; he was consecrated Bishop of Christchurch in 1890, and made Anglican Primate and Archbishop of New Zealand in 1922. In 1890, George Julius enrolled in a BSc degree course at Canterbury College. 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, at the same time as Ernest Rutherford, graduating through the University of New Zealand.
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. 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 at Ellerslie Racecourse, Auckland, New Zealand in 1913, which was entirely manual in operation, and the second at Gloucester Park Racetrack in Western Australia, electrically driven. The patent was lodged on 21 December 1914. Subsequent orders kept the firm of Julius, Poole & Gibson solvent throughout the Great Depression, with the first UK installation in 1928, for greyhound racing and in 1932 the first American installation at Hialeah Park, Florida.
In 1898, he married Eva O'Connor, daughter of Charles Yelverton O'Connor, and they had three sons. The eldest, Awdry Francis Julius, was later to become a partner in his father's firm. Another, George Yelverton Julius, was known as "Gentleman George". However, he brought his good upbringing into a life of crime. In 1953 he went to jail for eight years for burglary. He was the father of Wendy Whiteley, wife of the Australian painter Brett Whiteley, and his granddaughter was Arkie Whiteley. A third son died during a flight around Australia in a single-seater aeroplane. A road in the grounds of the CSIRO headquarters in Canberra is named in his honour.
