Maker Info
Clair D. Lake
Clair D. Lake (1888-1958) was a chief engineer at IBM. He developed the first Type 1 Total Printing And Listing Tabulator in the early 1920s. Lake and his staff also developed the Type 512 and 513 high-speed reproducers and many machines related technological functions, such as summary punching.
From 1925 until 1930, Lake served as plant superintendent and senior engineer at IBM's Endicott, New York facility. He was assisted by George Daly and Ralph Page.
Page was responsible for developing the 80-column IBM punched card, related sensing or punching apparatus, low-cost wire contact relays and unit counters. He also developed a telephone key punch used in telephone record keeping.
Lake met Harvard's Howard Aiken in early 1938 and became chief engineer for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Mark I) project in May 1939. Aiken considered Lake, F.E. Hamilton, and Benjamin Durfee his co-inventors of the MARK I.
After the MARK I, Lake worked on the MARK II and other projects.
Clair Lake died in 1958.
