The Hofgaard machine

Rolf Hofgaard took out and maintained a number of patents on electromechanical calculators from 1924 to the mid-1950s. A 1956 prototype for an electronic office machine with indexing, calculating, input and printing units belongs to the collection of The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology .

In the latter half of the 1920s, Hofgaard was in the most central office technology development environments in the United States. He established, among other things, a large development laboratory in partnership with Remington. From the mid-1930s to 1960, Hofgaard worked in Norway, eventually in collaboration with the electrical company Sønnico. The machine was demonstrated in the mid-1950s, but never put into production. The prototype was given to The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology , but has never been exhibited.

What can such a machine and such a development project teach us about technological development, or more specifically about the creation of computers?

By the end of the 1950s, Hofgaard's solutions had been overtaken by the digital electronic computers that found their basic design during the first decade after World War II.

From research environments in the USA and Great Britain, primarily financed by the needs of war technology, industrial solutions aimed at military and civilian markets sprang up. The Norwegian electronics environment after the war had strong connections to the Anglo-American environments, first through contacts established through the dozens of Norwegian engineers and scientists who were in exile in Great Britain during the war, and there gained access to the most central British electronics research environments.

In the post-war years, study trips and stays at various American environments were mandatory for those who led the way in machine building in Norway in the 1950s. Jens Glad Balchen at NTH is said to have found inspiration from a study stay at Yale University in 1951 for his electronic analog machine DIANA. Similarly, Thomas Hysing, who led the work on Norway's first electronic digital machine NUSSE at SI in Oslo, had a study stay in relay technology at UCLA Berkley, before he started machine construction in Oslo in 1951.

The next generation of NTH engineers who formed the core of the numerical group at FFI, many of whom would break out and start what became Norsk Data, were in turn on longer study stays at MIT. These well-known stories give the overall impression that the connections between the US and Norwegian development environments regarding electronic calculators are a purely post-war phenomenon. The story of Rolf Hofgaard and his machine may modify this.

Norwegian and international computer history has a heavy emphasis on developments after 1945. Computer history research has thus largely concentrated on the history after 1945, with an emphasis on wartime projects and the introduction of the radio tube as crucial.

Norwegian research follows the same line. The picture is dominated by the research institutions' interest in computing power, and gradually a state-supported interest in the acquisition and use of electronic calculators also in industry and administration. Accounts of environments and people involved in the development of a Norwegian computer industry begin in 1945.

In this tradition, the American ENIAC ancestor – the first generation – and today's diversified machine park are all in some way ENIAC's descendants. In such a genealogy, there is a danger of defining a "year zero" that weakens the picture of important backgrounds, transitions and overlaps between technologists.

One specific story is most often absent: Rolf Hofgaard's work with his data processing system aimed at private business, developed in collaboration with the leading American office machine companies in the 1920s, and in collaboration with Norwegian investors in the 1930s to 1950s.

Hofgaard is most active in the transition between the first mechanical calculators and punched card systems that Hollerith and Bull represent in Norway, and the post-war “zero point” with electronics and radio tubes. Although he was also active in Norway in the post-war period, during the same period as the Norwegian electronics pioneers, he is not mentioned in the literature. This may be because the Hofgaard machine is an example of a failed innovation. It stands out with its narrative power about a transitional technology and a development project that was not an oddity on a small scale, lonely in a secluded garage.

On the contrary, Hofgaard is among the first to make the journey from Norway to the United States to contribute to bringing the office machine industry into the electronic age. He establishes cooperation with one of the leading companies in the industry, Remington, which enters into a partnership with Hofgaard and sets up a large development lab in Bridgeport CN.

The crash of 1929 and the ensuing turmoil put an end to the Hofgaard-Remington Corporation, and the estate was sold to National Cash Register (NCR). According to Hofgaard, about a hundred patents were included in the purchase.

Does this mean that Hofgaard's development work also left its mark on the post-war machinery, as developed by companies such as Remington, NCR and IBM? These are among the questions that will be examined.

Most importantly, the research project will shed new light on one of the museum's objects, simply by asking "What kind of machine is this?", and then place all findings into the larger computer history narrative, which, like most other aspects of technology and innovation history, is rarely about the ingenious inventions and clear breakthroughs of individuals, but about the many thousands of small and large attempts, missteps, breakthroughs and choices on the road to our modern information society.