Regarded as the father of information processing, Herman Hollerith’s main achievement was the creation of a system for recording and retrieving information on punched cards. The system was used for data processing and gained widespread usage after successfully handling the computation of the 1890 U.S. census. Hollerith went on to found the company that eventually became International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).
Hollerith was born on February 29, 1860, in Buffalo, New York. His parents were German immigrants, and his father was a teacher of classics. Equal emphasis was placed on course work and practical work at the Columbia School of Mines in New York, where Hollerith was an engineering student. He studied physics and chemistry, as well as surveying, geometry, drawing, and assaying. The school’s requirement that engineering students visit places of industry to observe practical methods likely drew Hollerith to machine and metallurgy shops, which would later play a significant role in his career.
After graduating in 1879, Hollerith worked with his instructor, W. P. Trowbridge, on the 1880 U.S. census. By then, the census had become a labor-intensive, time-consuming project. Though the census itself took only a few months to carry out, tabulating and analyzing the 1880 data was projected to take nearly a decade. A mechanical solution was needed. Dr. John Shaw Billings, the head of the division of vital statistics, recognized potential in Hollerith and discussed with him the possibility of a tabulating system that would solve the problem the census bureau faced. Thus, after Hollerith left the census bureau to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1882-1884) and work at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., he continued to investigate the census problem.
Herman Hollerith, who founded the company that became IBM, invented this punch card tabulator for the 1890 census, a precursor to the modern computer.
By 1884, Hollerith had developed a first design and applied for a patent. The system used punched tape that ran over a metal drum and under brushes. Whenever the brushes encountered a hole, a circuit was completed and the data recorded. The use of electricity increased the speed and efficiency of the system. Hollerith continued to make design modifications to the machine, including the use of punched cards rather than paper. The machine-readable cards, which came to be known as the Hollerith cards, were more easily replaced and corrected than tape. By 1887, he had developed a machine designed for the census that could handle up to 80 cards per minute. The code used to record the alphanumeric information on the punch cards was called the Hollerith code.
When the census bureau began preparing for the 1890 census, it held a competition to find the best system. Competitors were to input and tabulate data from one city, and each method was timed. The systems of competitors William Hunt and Charles Pidgin took more than 100 hours to input the data, while Hollerith’s system took just more than 72 hours. For the computation, Pidgin’s system took more than 44 hours and Hunt’s more than 55. Hollerith’s machine tabulated the data in five hours and 28 minutes and won the competition. Using Hollerith’s system, the 1890 census took three years to process, compared to the seven years it took for the 1880 census to be completed.
Hollerith adapted his machine for commercial use after the 1890 census, and in 1896 he established his own company, the Tabulating Machine Company, which manufactured and marketed his systems. His business was successful, and his machines, because of their versatility and ability to work with data of almost any kind, were used in a variety of trades. In 1911, Hollerith sold his share of the company, and the company became IBM in 1924. Hollerith’s census methods persisted into the 1960s and helped move the field of data processing into the computer age.
