Please help us identify this item the age may be detected from the wiring and the solenoids. It measures 7 inches by 5.5 inches.
Please email collection@computinghistory.org.uk with any information. Thank you.

A great response from all who have contacted us - many thanks. Some of these are shown below but the definitive answer from Henk Stegeman of the Netherlands is that:

it is Your new acquisition is a electro-mechanical counter from a IBM 405.
Attached you will pictures of the one I have and some IBM drawings dated 1945. - see these on this page.

Other suggestions were:

No clue to dates can only guess late 1940's ?

/electromagnets to select different circuits via the early wafer switches. Could even be an early telephone style relay...

not a lot of help but an early type of board you can pull out and slot a new one into a computer, mechanical relays...

Is it a tape puncher? You know the thing that punches the holes in the paper tape. Pre magnetic tape.

Looks like something telephone based, like part auto dialler card (one dial with 10 digits, 2nd with the 10+2)

This looks to be a pair of stepping relays.  It appears that one has 10 positions (11 terminals) and the other has 12 (13 terminals). To me, the 12 position relay suggests a time of day or calendar application.

I have seen old time-of-day clocks and calendars for vintage computers that worked this way, where time was kept by advancing mechanical stepping relays and the computer just read the contact positions via a parallel GPIO interface.

I don't recognize this particular device, however, and electromechanical stepping relays were used for all kinds of things -- telephone switching, counting, clocks, elevator (lift) controls, industrial controls, etc. etc.

I would look towards a telephone exchange type device.

Clicks from a rotary type phone would click the solenoids then a circuit would be made from the disk thingies :)

Dual stepper relay, probably used in a power-sequence controller. I built a pulse-driven adder out of similar switches when I was a kid in the early 1970's. Mine came from Automatic Electric (GTE.) Yours looks more like a GE or Honeywell version. The parts I had were dated 1960 and came from a telephone switch.