Straus, Harry Lobe, 1896-1949

Harry Lobe Straus, an early computer engineer, was born in Baltimore on March 10, 1896, and graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1917. Beginning in 1928, Straus developed the totalisator or "tote board", an electronic system that printed and issued betting tickets at racetracks, automatically computed the bets and odds, and displayed them on a large board. The first complete totalisator system was installed at Arlington Park in Chicago in 1933 and made possible modern, large-scale racetrack betting. Straus formed the American Totalisator Company to manufacture the system in 1932. Through his involvement with racing, Straus also became a horse breeder at his Cherry Hill Farm near Reisterstown and an investor in several racetracks.

After the war, Straus was quick to recognize the potential of the digital computer and in 1948 became the major financial backer of J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, inventors of the UNIVAC. Less than a year later, on Oct. 25, 1949, Straus was killed in the crash of a private plane near Perryville, Md. Deprived of his money and marketing savvy, Eckert and Mauchly were obliged to sell their company to Remington-Rand in 1950. Likewise, American Totalisator remained a small specialty company instead of evolving into a computer giant and was sold to Universal Products Company in 1956.