IBM 040 Tape Controlled Card Punch

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.