Storebrand
In 1916 he was hired as a technical inspector of the insurance company Storebrand where he came on contact with the tabulating machines of those days.
The punched cards and the tabulating machines were initially developed by the U.S. engineer Herman Hollerith and were used for first time in Norway by Statistics Norway in 1894.
It's told that Bull's interest for those machines comes from a travel. Fredrik Bull was sent abroad to study Hollerith's systems from where he returned with a clear idea that Hollerith's systems were expensive and unstable. He was convinced to be able to develop something that was cheaper and more efficient than Hollerith's. As a result, got paid an advance of $10,000 for work on his machine. Working conditions were difficult because in the case the project was not successful the total amount should be refunded.
His plan was to use electromagnetic technology like Hollerith, but with a considerable number of improvements. The use of 45 columns punched cards allowed to read the information while making contact through the holes. This method allowed to treat the information faster. While the machines currently forced to do much of the work manually, Bull provided several improvements to reduce this part of manual work, such as standardization of punched-cards and pre-selection. In modern terminology we could say that the improvements they wanted to make were a "universal programmable tabulating machine".
Read more about this topic: Fredrik Rosing Bull