Herman Hollerith
1860-1929
American Inventor, Businessman and Statistical Engineer
Herman Hollerith's invention of a machine able to tabulate information encoded in the form of holes punched in paper cards dramatically speeded up the 1890 United States census, and laid the foundation for the explosion of information processing in the twentieth century. The business Hollerith founded in 1896, the Tabulating Machine Company, later became a major component of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).
The child of German immigrants, Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, on February 29, 1860. He entered college at age 15, attending both City College of New York and Columbia School of Mines. He graduated from the School of Mines in 1879 with a degree in engineering.
That same year Hollerith moved to Washington, D.C., to accept a position as a special agent in the United States Census Office. The Census Office was responsible for counting the country's population every 10 years, and for deriving employment, income, and other statistics from the census reports. Hollerith proved a gifted statistician, and within a few months his $600 annual salary was raised to $800. His experiences in the tabulation of the 1880 census would alter the course of his life. A brief stint atthe United States Patent Office would likewise prove valuable to him later on.
Herman Hollerith. (The Library of Congress. Reproduced by permission.)In 1882 Hollerith left the Census Office and joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an engineering instructor. While teaching mechanical engineering, among other subjects, Hollerith turned his mind to the question of increasing the efficiency with which census information could be tabulated.
Beginning in 1884, Hollerith devoted himself to his invention and to building a business around it. He applied for and was awarded patents for his devices, even as he continued to make improvements on them. By 1887 Hollerith machines were being used to calculate death statistics in both Baltimore and New York. He entered his machines in an 1889 competition to select the equipment that would tabulate the 1890 census. Hollerith won the competition and the census contract.
His tabulating machines accomplished the 1890 census in record time, completing the basic population count in under six months and the entire census in two years, coming in more than $5 million under budget. Hollerith and his business were firmly established. In 1897, with his business continuing to grow, he formed the Tabulating Machine Company.
Over the next decade Hollerith would continue to introduce innovations to his system, as well as expanding his commercial ventures. In addition to tabulating census information for countries around the world, Hollerith machines found use in virtually all types of industries, helping keep track of financial information, railroad shipments, insurance policies and mortality estimates, and wage and payroll figures.
In 1911, faced with an increasingly challenging competitive environment, Hollerith merged the Tabulating Machine Company with three other businesses to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R). Hollerith served as the company's first president, a position he held only briefly. From 1911 until his retirement in 1921, Hollerith remained involved with C-T-R as a consulting engineer, and one of the company's directors. Three years after Hollerith's retirement, the company changed names once more, becoming in 1924 International Business Machines, known throughout the world as IBM.
Following his retirement, Hollerith continued to pursue various inventions, as well as agricultural experiments, a long-standing hobby of his. He had made more than $1 million from the sale of his stock in C-T-R, but despite various plans for other businesses, he did not start another company. Married since 1890, he devoted the last years of his life to his family and to continuing improvements to the punched cards that had created his fame and fortune. He died on November 15, 1929.
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