Herman Hollerith

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Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith
Born February 29, 1860 (1860-02-29)
Buffalo, New York
Died November 17, 1929 (aged 69)
Washington, DC
Occupation statistician, inventor, businessman

Herman Hollerith (Buffalo, New York, February 29, 1860 – Washington, D.C., November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards in order to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data.

Contents

[edit] Personal life

Hollerith 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 Veracruz, 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."[2] He also "liked good cigars, fine wine, Guernsey cows, and money.... He disliked property taxes and hard-driving salesmen."[3]

He died in 1929 of a heart attack and was buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

[edit] Electronic tabulation of statistical data

At the urging of John Shaw Billings[4], Hollerith developed a mechanism to make electrical connections trigger a counter to record information. A key idea was that data could be coded numerically. Hollerith saw that if numbers could be punched in specified locations on a card, in the now familiar rows and columns, then the cards could be counted or sorted mechanically. On January 8, 1889, he was issued U.S. Patent 395,782 , claim 2 of which reads:

The herein-described method of compiling statistics, which consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holes punched in sheets of electrically non-conducting material, and bearing a specific relation 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] Inventions and businesses

Hollerith built machines under contract for the US Census Bureau, which used them to tabulate the 1890 census in only one year.[5] The 1880 census had taken eight years. Hollerith then started his own business in 1896, founding 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 and the first key punch (i.e. a punch that was operated from a keyboard), which allowed a skilled operator to punch 200–300 cards per hour. He also invented a tabulator. The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards. A wiring panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator allowed 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.

In 1911, four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR).[6] Under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson, it was renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Austrian, G.D. (1982). Herman Hollerith: The Forgotten Giant of Information Processing. Columbia. ISBN 0231051468. 
  • Hollerith, Herman (1890). In connection with the electric tabulation system which has been adopted by U.S. government for the work of the census bureau (Ph.D. dissertation). Columbia University School of Mines. 
  • Hollerith, H. (April 1889). "An Electric Tabulating System". The Quarterly, Columbia University School of Mines X (16): 238-255. 
  • Hollerith, Herman (December 1894). "The Electric Tabulating Machine". Journal of the Royal Statistical Association 57 (4): 678-682. 
  • This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Lucia Beverley Talcott. RootsWeb. Retrieved on 2007-01-18.
  2. ^ Black, Edwin (2001). IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation. Diane Pub. Co.. , quoted in Allen, Frederick E. (July/August 2001). "Hitler and IBM: Did a Company and a Machine Spawn Evil?". American Heritage 52 (5). 
  3. ^ Aul, William R. (November 1972). "Herman Hollerith: Data Processing Pioneer". Think: 22-24. International Business Machines Corp.. 
  4. ^ 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, 32. 
  5. ^ Hollerith's Electric Sorting and Tabulating Machine, ca. 1895 from the American Memory archives of the Library of Congress
  6. ^ IBM Archives: Frequently Asked Questions. Some accounts of the merger forming CTR state that three corporations were merged. This reference notes that only three of the four merged corporations are represented in the CTR name. That may be the reason for the differing accounts.

[edit] External links

Hollerith's grave at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
Hollerith's grave at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
Persondata
NAME Hollerith, Herman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION statistician, inventor, businessman
DATE OF BIRTH February 29, 1860 (1860-02-29)
PLACE OF BIRTH Buffalo, New York
DATE OF DEATH November 17, 1929
PLACE OF DEATH