History

Time clock, made by National Time Recorder Co. Ltd. of Blackfriars, London at Wookey Hole Caves museum

A Bundy Clock used by Birmingham City Transport to ensure that bus drivers did not depart from outlying termini before the due time; now preserved at Walsall Arboretum

contactless magnetic time clock card

Electronic time clock

An early and influential time clock, sometimes described as the first, was invented on November 20, 1888, by Willard Le Grand Bundy,^[2] a jeweler in Auburn, New York. His patent of 1890^[3] speaks of mechanical time recorders for workers in terms that suggest that earlier recorders already existed, but Bundy's had various improvements; for example, each worker had his own key. A year later his brother, Harlow Bundy, organized the Bundy Manufacturing Company,^[4][5] and began mass-producing time clocks. In 1900, the time recording business of Bundy Manufacturing, along with two other time equipment businesses, was consolidated into the International Time Recording Company (ITR).^[6][7][8][9] In 1911, ITR, Bundy Mfg., and two other companies were merged, forming Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR), which would later change its name to IBM.^[10] In 1958, IBM's Time Equipment Division was sold to the Simplex Time Recorder Company. However in the United Kingdom ITR (A subsidiary of IBM United Kingdom Ltd.) was the subject of a management buy-out in 1963 and reverted to International Time Recorders. In 1982, International Time Recorders was acquired by Blick Industries of Swindon, England, who were themselves later absorbed by Stanley Security Systems.
The first punched-card system to be linked to a Z80 microprocessor was developed by Kronos Incorporated in the late 1970s and introduced as a product in 1979.^[11]
In the late twentieth century, time clocks started to move away from the mechanical machines to computer based, electronic time and attendance systems. The employee either swipes a magnetic stripe card, scans a barcode, brings an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag into proximity with a reader, enters an employee number or uses a biometric reader to identify the employee to the system. These systems are much more advanced than the mechanical time clock, various reports can be generated, including European working time directive, and a Bradford factor report. Employees can also request holidays, enter in absenteeism requests and view their worked hours. User interfaces can be personalized and offer robust self-service capabilities.
More recently, time clocks have started to adopt technology commonly seen in phones and tablets - called 'Smartclocks'. The state of the art smartclocks come with multi-touch screens, full color displays, real time monitoring for problems, wireless networking and over the air updates. Some of the smartclocks use front facing cameras to capture employee clock-ins to deter "buddy clocking", a problem usually requiring expensive biometric clocks. With the increasing popularity of cloud based software, some of the newer time clocks are