Herman Hollerith (1860-1929)
Herman Hollerith was born Feb. 29, 1860 in Buffalo, NY. His parents were German immigrants who immigrated into the country in 1848. His father died when Hollerith was seven. As a child, Hollerith was a loner and a creative thinker greatly because of his father's death. Hollerith enrolled in 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 registered himself as a mining engineer while living in Manhattan, and he finished his Ph.D. in 1890 at Columbia University. In 1890, on September 15, he married Lucia Beverley Talcott of Veracruz, Mexico, and they had six children (three sons and three daughters).
Herman Hollerith made a major contribution to the invention of the modern digital computer with his punched card tabulating machine, invented in 1890. His innovation became the groundwork of a company that evolved into International Business Machines (IBM). Hollerith's punch cards and tabulating machines were a step towards automated computing. His device could automatically read data which had been punched onto card.
After graduating from the Columbia University School of Mines in 1879, Hollerith started to work with the United States Census Bureau's division of vital statistics. Herman Hollerith first got his idea for the punch-card tabulation machine from seeing a train conductor punch tickets. For his tabulation machine he employed the punchcard invented in the early 1800s, by a French silk weaver named Joseph-Marie Jacquard. Jacquard formulated a way of automatically containing the warp and weft threads on a silk loom by registering patterns of holes in a chain of cards. In 1881, Herman Hollerith began designing a machine to tabulate census data more efficiently than by conventional manual methods. The U.S. Census Bureau had taken eight years to complete the 1880 census, and it was feared that the 1890 census would take still longer.
In 1881, at the prompting of the division's director, Hollerith started designing a machine to tabulate census data more efficiently than manual methods. He based his machine, named a press, on electrical signals that were channeled only when holes in paper or cards crossed over the contacts. Electro-mechanical tabulators, like those in old-fashioned adding machines, counted the signals. He rapidly switched from tape to cards that were the same size as dollar bills of that time, which let him integrate money storage cases in his equipment. Later models could sort in addition to adding, and had automatic card punching. Each machine was able to count up to 10,000 items. Hollerith sold his initial machine to the United States Army for compiling medical statistics. He then accepted a contract from the Census Bureau for machines to be used in the 1890 census.
Herman Hollerith's greatest breakthrough was his usage of electricity to read, count, and classify punched cards whose holes represented data collected by the census-takers. His machines were used for the 1890 census and accomplished in one year what would have taken virtually ten years of hand tabulating, saving the Census Bureau $5 million. It was the beginning of modern data processing. He also used his invention as the foundation for a thesis and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University that same year.
In 1896, Hollerith established the Tabulating Machine Company to distribute and improve his basic machine. Patents and sales of the tabulating machine and other innovations made Hollerith a millionaire. In 1911 TMC merged with other companies, becoming the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company . In 1914, C-T-R hiredThomas J. Watson as general manager. Watson later purchased the company, naming it IBM. ... International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or Big Blue) (NYSE: IBM) (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888).
Despite the development of computers during the 20th century, variations of Hollerith's card tabulating machine continue to have a place in modern data processing. They continue to be widely used in voting machines.
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