He was a locksmith basically but actually he made the tumblers for safe combinations and he was very much attuned to the political world and the times and with the problems with elections, particular in New York City in the 1880s and the dominant metaphor then was the political machine, meaning the Tammany Ring of Boss Tweed, and so how do you fight corruption in politics, how do fight a political machine. Well, the answer was you make a voting machine.
Source
Interview with Larry Bird, Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.