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Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was an American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from thousands and millions of data.
Personal life
He was born on February 29, 1860, in Buffalo, New York, to Johann Georg Hollerith (1808–1869) and Franciska Brunn, both of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. He entered the City College of New York in 1875 and graduated from the Columbia University School of Mines with an "Engineer of Mines" degree in 1879. In 1880, he listed himself as a mining engineer while living in Manhattan, and he completed his Ph.D. in 1890 at Columbia University. In 1890, he married Lucia Beverley Talcott (1865–?) of Vera Cruz, Mexico, and they had six children. Other than his inventions, Hollerith was said to cherish three things: his German heritage, his privacy, and his cat Bismarck. He died in 1929 of a heart attack and was buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
Electronic tabulation of statistical data
Hollerith spent 1882 on the staff of the Mechanical Engineering faculty at MIT. During that year he developed a prototype of a system for storing data on punched cards. This was partly inspired by the system used by railroad conductors, in which holes punched in various places on a passenger's ticket identified the holder's passenger status. Urged on by John Shaw Billings, he developed a mechanism for reading the presence or absence of holes in the cards using spring-mounted needles that passed through the holes to make electrical connections to trigger a counter to record one more of each value. The key idea (due to Billings), however, was that all personal data could be coded numerically. Hollerith saw that if the numbers could then be punched in specified columns on the cards, the cards could be sorted mechanically, and therefore the appropriate columns totalled. He described his idea in Patent No. 395,782 of January 8, 1889 as follows:
The herein to each other and to a standard, and then counting or tallying such statistical items separately or in combination by means of mechanical counters operated by electro-magnets the circuits through which are controlled by the perforated sheets, substantially as and for the purpose set forth.
Tabulating Machine Company
He built machines under contract for the US Census Bureau, which used them to tabulate the 1890 census in much less time than the 1880 census. He started his own business in 1896 when he founded the Tabulating Machine Company. Most of the major census bureaus around the world leased his equipment and purchased his cards, as did major insurance companies. To make his system work he invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism, the first key punch (i.e. a punch that was operated from a keyboard) allowing a skilled operator to punch 200–300 cards per hour, and a wiring panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator allowing it to do different jobs without having to be rebuilt (the first step towards programming). The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards. These inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry.
International Business Machines
In 1911 his firm merged with two others to form the Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) Corporation. Under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson it was renamed IBM in 1924.
External links
- Hollerith's patents from 1889:
- Hollerith page at the National Hall of Fame
- Map to his gravesite
- More on Hollerith and his original tabulator
- "Inventor of the Week" biography at Lemelson-MIT Program site
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"Herman Hollerith"