JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post in The History of Lines series

And so I came to this fabulous word in a running title in the pages of the November 13, 1926 issue of the Illustrated London News–what a fabulous thing, in- or out-of-context!

Totalisator.

It appears as a noun in the Oxford English Dictionary as “totalizator”, and goes back to a first use in 1879 in reference to the Pari(s)-Mutuel system of betting–but here, in this article, the “totalisator” is an electric betting mechanism.

It could also be the nickname of a certain Golem-like U.S. politician implausibly running for the presidency who can make no mistake and is a fanatic for himself no matter the consequence or the validity, or it could be the name of a 1960’s Japanese cartoon monster (either heroic or evil), or it could be an adversary of the 1966 Batman, or it could be a 1930’s Robot (pronounced “Robit”), or I guess a suite of a lot of other things.  It was certainly a behemoth when installed at Ascot in 1925/6, occupying 5 structures and run by a team of 1,000–a fantastic thing of the future, here today, and gone soon afterwards.  

“Totalisator” seems much more definitive and authoritative with a period at the end of the word, as above, in arial black.