Herman Hollerith

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Herman Hollerith
Herman Hollerith
Born February 29, 1860
Buffalo, New York
Died November 17, 1929
Occupation statistician, inventor, businessperson

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 millions of pieces of data.

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[edit] 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, on September 15, he married Lucia Beverley Talcott (December 3, 1865 – August 4, 1944) of Vera Cruz, Mexico, and they had six children (three sons and three daughters)[1]. 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..

[edit] Career[2]

After graduating, he immediately obtained a job with the US Census Bureau as a special agent collecting and analyzing statistical information on the use of steam and water power in the iron and steel industries. This was the inspiration for his one obsession as an inventor, and indeed for his one successful invention; his others were notably unsuccessful.

Although he subsequently moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an instructor, he still continued to research a device for recording census statistics. He knew, from his brother-in-law who was involved in the silk-weaving business, of the Jacquard loom which used holes in cards to program its complicated patterns of weaving, but it was reportedly the further inspiration of a 'punch photograph' train ticket, on which passenger details (such as height and hair color) were punched out around the edge by the conductor, that clinched his key invention. Hollerith decided that each census taker could do the same, with the resulting punched card being sorted by a variation of the Jacquard loom[1]; the important aspects of the invention being that the holes were sensed electrically rather than mechanically and that one card held all the information on an individual.

[edit] Electronic tabulation of statistical data

Thus, urged on by John Shaw Billings[2], 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.

[edit] Tabulating Machine Company

He built machines under contract for the US Census Bureau, which used them to tabulate the 1890 census in 2.5 years. The 1880 census had taken 7 years to complete. 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 tabulator. The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards. 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).These inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry.

[edit] International Business Machines

In 1911, his firm merged with two others to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR). Under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson, it was renamed IBM in 1924.

[edit] References

  • Austrian, G.D. (1982,). Herman Hollerith: The Forgotten Giant of Information Processing. Columbia.

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Hollerith Vertical Sorter
  2. ^ Lydenberg, Harry Miller (1924). John Shaw Billings: Creator of the National Medical Library and its Catalogue, First Director of the New York Public Library. American Library Association.see page 32

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

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