Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860-November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting.
His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century.
Hollerith founded a company that was amalgamated in 1911 with several other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.
In 1924, the company was renamed International Business Machines (IBM) and became one of the largest and most successful companies of the 20th century. Hollerith is regarded as one of the seminal figures in the development of data processing.
Herman Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860, where he also spent his early childhood.
At the suggestion of John Shaw Billings, Hollerith developed a mechanism using electrical connections to increment a counter, recording information.
Hollerith determined that data in specified locations on a card, arranged in rows and columns, could be counted or sorted electromechanically. 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 Brian Randell's 1982 The Origins of Digital Computers, Selected Papers.
On January 8, 1889, Hollerith was issued U.S. Patent 395,782.
Hollerith had left teaching and began working for the United States Census Bureau in the year he filed his first patent application. Titled Art of Compiling Statistics, it was filed on September 23, 1884; U.S. Patent 395,782 was granted on January 8, 1889.
Hollerith initially did business under his own name, as The Hollerith Electric Tabulating System, specializing in punched card data processing equipment. He provided tabulators and other machines under contract for the Census Office, which used them for the 1890 census. The net effect of the many changes from the 1880 census: the larger population, the data items to be collected, the Census Bureau headcount, the scheduled publications, and the use of Hollerith's electromechanical tabulators, reduced the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census.
In 1896, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company (in 1905 renamed The Tabulating Machine Company). Many major census bureaus around the world leased his equipment and purchased his cards, as did major insurance companies. Hollerith's machines were used for censuses in England & Wales, Italy, Germany, Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, and again in the 1900 U.S. census.
He invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism and the first keypunch. The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate on 1890 Census cards. A control panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator simplified rewiring for different jobs. The 1920s removable control panel supported prewiring and near instant job changing. These inventions were among the foundations of the data processing industry, and Hollerith's punched cards (later used for computer input/output) continued in use for almost a century.
In 1911, four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, were amalgamated to form a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). Under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson, CTR was renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924.
By 1933, The Tabulating Machine Company name had disappeared as subsidiary companies were subsumed by IBM.
Herman Hollerith died November 17, 1929. Hollerith is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in the Georgetown neighbourhood of Washington, D.C.
Hollerith cards were named after Herman Hollerith, as were Hollerith strings and Hollerith constants.
More information: Adam Smith Institute
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