John mctammany biography

John McTammany (c. 1845–1915) was a Scottish-born American inventor who is credited with a number of patents. He immigrated to the United States as a teenager and served in the American Civil War.^[1]

From 1880 through 1892, he focused on automatic player piano mechanisms,^[2][3] the free reed organette.^[4][5]

After 1892, McTammany's focus shifted to voting machines and automatic vote tabulators.

His first voting patent was for a "pneumatic registering ballot box" that counted individual punched-card ballots as they were deposited in a ballot box, with a pneumatic mechanism very similar to the pneumatic mechanisms used in player pianos.^[6] This machine was comparable in its intended use to a precinct-count optical scan voting system.

Some have described this the first voting machine based on perforations of paper.^[7] This is not the case; Kennedy Dougan patented a punched card voting system in