His first full-time job was for the United States Census Bureau, which was gearing up for the 1880 census. Hollerith came to the census job with some statistical experience; as a student at Columbia, he had worked for the statistician William Petit Trowbridge. At the Census Bureau, he met John S. Billings, director of the Census Bureau's division of vital statistics, who first suggested to Hollerith that a mechanical means should be invented to count the vast and rapidly increasing quantities of raw data that was generated in their work.
After the 1880 census, Hollerith worked as an instructor in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he experimented with railroad braking systems. He traveled by train to St. Louis and a few years later he traveled by train back to Washington, D.C. He could not help but notice that the conductor would punch various bits of information into each passenger's ticket, including place of boarding and destination. In Annals of the History of Computing, Friedrich W. Kistermann points out that in the same way the conductor used a paper ticket, "Hollerith's first test of his tabulating system used punched cards, one for each person, as the data medium, with the holes being punched with a simple conductor's hand punch."
In 1884 Hollerith returned to Washington, D.C., to work for the U.S.
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