Time clock

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Early 20th century time clock made by IBM. The face shows employee numbers which would be dialed up by employees entering and leaving the factory. The day and time of entry and exit was punched onto cards inside the box.

A time clock, sometimes known as a clock card machine or punch clock, is a mechanical (or electronic) timepiece used to assist in tracking the hours an employee of a company worked. In regards to mechanical time clocks this was accomplished by inserting a heavy paper card, called a time card, into a slot on the time clock. When the time card hit a contact at the rear of the slot, the machine would print day and time information on the card. This allowed a timekeeper to have an official record of the hours an employee worked to calculate and pay an employee.

1 History
2 Fingerprint clocks
3 See also
4 External links
5 Footnotes

[edit] History

The first time clock was invented in November 20, 1888, by Willard Bundy, a jeweler in Auburn, New York. A year later his brother, Harlow Bundy, organized the Bundy Manufacturing Company, ^[1] and began mass producing time clocks. Bundy Manufacturing, along with two other time equipment businesses, was consolidated into the International Time Recording Company (ITR). ^[2]^[3] In 1911 ITR and two other companies were merged, forming Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR), which would later change its name to IBM. In 1958 IBM's Time Equipment Division was sold to the Simplex Time Recorder Company.

The time cards usually had the workdays and time in and time out areas marked on them so that employees could "punch in" or "punch out" in the correct place. The employee was responsible to line up the correct area of the card to be punched with an indicator on the time card. Software applications offer such a system.

The first punch-card system to be linked to a Z80 microprocessor was developed by Mitrefinch Ltd of York in the early 1980s and was demonstrated on BBC's Tomorrow's World. In the 1990s, time clocks started to move away from the mechanical version to computer based, electronic time tracking systems. On these systems, the employee either enters an employee number, swipes a magnetic stripe card, or brings an RFID tag into proximity with a reader, or uses some other device to identify the employee to the system. Based on the system being used, the employee then enters what should be recorded. This could be "punching in", "punching out", lunch breaks, reason for leaving early, or any other type of information the employer requires. Biometric time clock systems are also used that authenticate employees while "punching in/out" though scanning finger prints, palm prints, or by measuring dimensions of the hand.

[edit] Fingerprint clocks

contactless magnetic time clock card

Fingerprint clocks are a type of biometric time clock for recording workers' hours on the job. Fingerprint clocks do not store images of a person's fingerprint, but store binary data representing the ridges and swirls of the fingerprint. Although this biometric time clock option is the most popular of all biometric options, it can in certain circumstances be unreliable. Dirty fingers or cuts on the hand can prevent an employee from clocking in.

Another reliable biometric option is a geometric hand reader such as Ingersoll Rand's Hand Punch series. These readers require the user to place their hand on a plate with studs to line the fingers up. The shape of the hand is scanned horizontally and across the side. These have the advantage of not requiring that the hands be particularly clean, but the chance of two employees having the same hand profile is increased (for example two members of the same family).