Time Clock, International Time Recording Company
name: label: maker
content: International Time Recording Company
notes: label: Description
content: This clock reportedly served as the timekeeper for employees at a jewelry business in Philadelphia in the early part of the twentieth century. Isaac Bedichimer, who had emigrated from Russa in 1860, owned the business and came to specialize in fraternal jewelry—the pins and emblems for organizations like the Masons and the Elks. There is no record of how many people worked for the business, but this clock came to the museum with a rack that could hold twenty-five cards to record “punching in and out,” the times of arrival and departure for a work shift.
label: Description
content: Keeping track of workers hours in the early nineteenth century was at first the job of clerks, who kept records by hand. By the late 1880s, though, time accounting had been mechanized. The time clock, introduced to record automatically the times an employee entered and left the workplace, came to symbolize industrialization itself.
label: Description
content: Daniel M. Cooper of Rochester, New York, received a patent for card-based time clock October 30, 1894. The Rochester Recorder Company formed to sell the clocks, which eventually became products of the International Time Recording Company. Founded in 1900, the ITRC supplied an entire line of timekeeping devices, including master clocks, several types of time clocks and time stamps. The firm continually expanded its product line, underwent several reorganizations and name changes, and emerged in 1924 as the International Business Machine Corporation, familiar today as IBM.
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Mechanisms
label: Exhibition
content: 2W Gateway
label: Exhibition Location
content: National Museum of American History
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1986.0354.02
label: catalog number
content: 1986.0354.02
label: accession number
content: 1986.0354
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Time Clock
label: Object Name
content: time clock, punch clock