TAUSCHEK, Gustav

At the beginning of his career T. was the messenger in Austrian National Bank, being in charge of various sections. He was very interested in engraving device and he tried to improve it. It consisted of a drawing surface and the matador. As the wooden structure did not allow Guilloche engraving technique, his idea was to smear a glass plate with soot, so that the device could use a sewing needle to draw the design. He later received the mandate to draw up a plan for the loan to the League of Nations by the National Bank. T. registered the patent for the engraving device in 1922 and then sold it to the Austrian National Bank.
Following this success, he renounced secure employment in the National Bank and completely devoted himself to the automatic control of bookkeeping. In short time he received a large number of patents, which soon exceeded 200. He developed a punch card-based accounting system, which operated on electro-mechanical principle. The Rhine works of metal products and machinery from Düsseldorf developed a part of his patent-protected accounting systems, but the contract was later suspended so in 1930 T. offered some of these devices to Technical Museum in Vienna. The museum accepted them only after the intervention of Physicist Josef Nagler, who was later director of the museum. In cooperation with Nagler he created a device that was capable of reading, recording and computing and was later presented to the public at a press conference. Representatives of the International Business Machine Corporation (IBM) were interested in the device so T. sold 169 patents to the company. Among other devices, they bought patents for: punch card-based machines, mixers, sorting machines, tabulating equipment and computational facilities. The punch card-based calculating machines that existed at the time were not able to perform functions of multiplication and division at once.
T. proved to be a very successful inventor in other areas as well. He designed the mower, developed a supplement to mechanical calculating device, which changed it into a electronic calculation device, he also invented an encryption machine, which operated on the mechanical basis and one which operated based on optical-electrical principle, a typewriter without the letters and the display of interim results in computational devices.