Librarian and inventor, Alexander J. Rudolph served as assistant librarian from 1894 to 1911. During the 1880's Rudolph worked as assistant librarian in the San Francisco Public Library. He came to the Newberry Library in 1894 with John Vance Cheney, former head of the San Francisco Library and newly appointed Librarian of the Newberry. Rudolph was also an inventor of many library devices including the Rudolph Continuous Indexer (1893), an evolutionary link from book catalogue to card catalogue, which he patented and manufactured. The Newberry may have the only surviving example of the Indexer. However, none of his inventions were commercially successful and in 1911, two years after Cheney's departure, Rudolph was dismissed from the Library due to personality conflicts with the new administration. Market speculation failed to bring monetary success in the coming years and on August 16, 1917, Rudolph committed suicide due to his "fear of an old age embittered by blindness, deafness, and poverty."