A jeweler in Auburn, New York, built the device that would become part of IBM.
In 1888, Willard Le Grand Bundy, a jeweler in Auburn, New York, patented a mechanical time recorder that allowed workers to stamp their start and end times on a paper roll using individually numbered keys.1 His patent of 1890 described the device in terms that suggested earlier recorders already existed, but Bundy's design was more practical. Each worker carried a personal key, and the machine linked their identity to a precise timestamp.
A year later, Willard's brother Harlow organized the Bundy Manufacturing Company and began mass-producing the clocks.2
By 1898, the company had grown to 140 employees and sold more than 9,000 time recorders, marketed as a solution for what advertisements called the vexatious question of recording employee time.3
In 1894, Daniel M. Cooper of Rochester, New York, patented the first punch card time recorder, which used a physical card rather than a key.4 The card-based system eventually replaced Bundy's key system, though the machines continued to be called Bundy clocks, particularly in Australia.
In 1900, the Bundy Manufacturing Company merged with two other time-equipment businesses to form the International Time Recording Company. In 1911, that company was amalgamated with the Computing Scale Company and the Tabulating Machine Company to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which in 1924 changed its name to International Business Machines, or IBM.1
IBM sold its Time Equipment Division to the Simplex Time Recorder Company in 1958.1
The first punched-card system linked to a microprocessor was developed by Kronos Incorporated in the late 1970s.1 The physical punch card has been replaced by magnetic stripe cards, RFID tags, and biometric scanners, but the underlying logic remains what Bundy built in 1888: a machine that converts a worker's presence into a recorded unit of employer-owned time.