Norwegian inventor Rolf Hofgaard (1889–1972) received a number of patents in relay technology, which he used to develop one of the world's first fully relay-based calculators. He built several prototypes between 1922 and 1954, and came close to a breakthrough several times.
Despite good and financially strong partners and great interest from professionals and the leading companies in the world's office and computer industry over four decades, Hofgaard never succeeded in developing the machine into a finished product. The invention never became an innovation.
The last prototype of the Hofgaard machine has been in the museum's collections since 1972, but has never been exhibited or researched until now. Conservator Dag Andreassen has a brand new PhD on the invention that never became an innovation.
The thesis tells the unknown story of a Norwegian invention, an important intermediate step in the development of modern computers, Norwegian industrial establishment in the United States just before the Wall Street crash of 1929, and how giants such as IBM and Philips almost incorporated Rolf Hofgaard's relay inventions into their first digital office computers.
Speaker, Dag Andreassen is a conservator at The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, and in April 2026 defended his PhD thesis "The invention that never became an innovation. Rolf Hofgaard's universal office machine 1920-1960".
