Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith
Born February 29, 1860(1860-02-29)
Buffalo, New York
Died November 17, 1929(1929-11-17) (aged 69)
Washington, D.C.
Resting place Oak Hill Cemetery
Education City College of New York (1875)
Columbia University School of Mines (1879)
Occupation Statistician, inventor, businessman
Known for mechanical tabulation of punched card data
Spouse Lucia Beverley Talcott (1865–1944) (m. 1890–1929) «start: (1890-09-15)–end+1: (1930)»"Marriage: Lucia Beverley Talcott (1865–1944) to Herman Hollerith" Location: (linkback:http://localhost../../../../articles/h/e/r/Herman_Hollerith_78c8.html)
Awards Elliott Cresson Medal (1890)

Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of the company that became IBM.

Contents

Personal life

Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, where he spent his early childhood. 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 completed his Ph.D. in 1890 at Columbia University. Despite his time in New York City, Herman Hollerith lived most of his life in Buffalo.

Electronic tabulation of data

At the urging of John Shaw Billings[1], Hollerith developed a mechanism using electrical connections to trigger a counter, recording 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 and the data recorded. A description of this system, An Electric Tabulating System (1889), was submitted by Hollerith to Columbia University as his doctoral thesis, and is reprinted in Randell's book.[2] On January 8, 1889, Hollerith was issued U.S. Patent 395,782[3], 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.

Inventions and businesses

Hollerith punched card

Hollerith had left teaching and begun working for the United States Census Office in the year he filed his first patent application. Titled "Art of Compiling Statistics", it was filed on September 23, 1884; U.S. Patent No. 395782 was granted on January 8, 1889.[4]

Hollerith built machines under contract for the Census Office, 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 (that is, a punch operated by a keyboard); a skilled operator could punch 200–300 cards per hour. He also invented a tabulator. The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards. A control panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator allowed it to do different jobs without being 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.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ 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. pp. 32. 
  2. ↑ Randell (ed.), Brian (1982). The Origins of Digital Computers, Selected Papers, 3rd ed. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-11319-3. 
  3. ↑ See U.S. Patent 395,782
  4. ↑ The Invention and Development of the Hollerith Punched Card
  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" (PDF). http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/documents/pdf/faq.pdf.  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.

Further reading

External links

Hollerith's grave at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C.