IBM hired engineer-inventor Charles
Doty in 1925, and he first worked as a secretary
at the company’s main office at 50 Broad Street
in Manhattan before transferring to the engineering
laboratory at 225 Varick Street. Doty went on to
write the specifications for a tape-to-card converter
for engineers in IBM’s development laboratory
in Endicott, N.Y. The first such machine consisted
of a keypunch to which relays had been added to
convert the code of the paper tape to the code of
the punched cards, along with an attached paper-tape
reading device. The engineering model was delivered
and placed into testing on May 12, 1941, just three
months after getting the green light for development.
During the summer of 1941, the United States Army
Air Corps received the first 10 units of the machine
seen here, which was then known as the IBM 40 Tape
Controlled Card Punch. Following delivery to the
Air Corps, the Army’s Quartermaster Department,
Signal Corps and other military organizations used
the IBM 40, and its counterpart IBM 57 card-to-tape
punch, for defense work during World War II. Commercial
installations of both machines were also made at
the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad;
RCA; Bethlehem Steel; Vanity Fair; Western Electric;
Merrill Lynch; Harris Upsham and others. (VV4003)