Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerithwas an American inventor of a tabulating machine that was an important precursor of the electronic computer.

Immediately after graduation from the Columbia University School of Mines in 1879, Hollerith became an assistant to his teacher William P. Trowbridge in the U.S. census of 1880. During the next decade he taught briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; experimented on air brakes; and worked for the Patent Office in Washington, D.C.

During all this time Hollerith was occupied with the problem of automating the tabulation work of the census. The complete tabulation of the data from the 1880 census had taken seven years, and the 1890 census aimed to collect even more data, leading some to question if the 1890 census would be complete before the next census in 1900. By the time of the 1890 census, he had invented machines to record statistics by electrically reading and sorting punched cards that had been numerically encoded by perforation position. In an 1888 test against two competing systems, Hollerith’s system won easily, tabulating the census data for over 10,000 people in 5.5 hours, compared with 44.5 and 55.5 hours for his competitors. The invention was a success in the United States, with the final count for the population (62,622,250) complete by the end of 1890 and the full tabulation of all data complete in two years, but the tabulating machine drew much more attention in Europe, where it was widely adopted for a number of statistical purposes. In 1896 Hollerith organized the Tabulating Machine Company, incorporated in New York, to manufacture the machines; through subsequent mergers it grew into the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

Geoffrey D. Austrian, Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing (1982), is a classic biography of a towering figure from the beginnings of IBM.