Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith
Herman Hollerith
Born	February 29 1860(1860-02-29) Buffalo, New York
Died	November 17 1929 (aged 69)
Occupation	statistician, inventor, businessman

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

Personal life

Hollerith 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 he completed his Ph.D. in 1890 at Columbia University. In 1890, on September 15, he married Lucia Beverley Talcott (December 3, 1865 – August 4, 1944) of Veracruz, Mexico, and they had six children (three sons and three daughters)^[1]. Other than his inventions, Hollerith was said to cherish three things: his German heritage, his privacy and his cat, Bismarck. He also liked good cigars, fine wine, Guernsey cows, and money. He also disliked property taxes, and the hard-driving salesmen of Thomas J. Watson, Sr. He died in 1929 of a heart attack and was buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Electronic tabulation of statistical data

Being urged by John Shaw Billings^[2], Herman Hollerith developed a mechanism for reading the presence or absence of holes in the cards using spring-mounted needles that passed through the holes to make electrical connections to trigger a counter to record one more of each value. The key idea (due to Billings), however, was that all personal data could be coded numerically. Hollerith saw that if the numbers could then be punched in specified columns on the cards, the cards could be sorted mechanically, and therefore the appropriate columns totaled. On January 8 1889, he was issued U.S. Patent 395,782 , claim 2 of which reads:

Tabulating Machine Company

Hollerith built machines under contract for the US Census Bureau, which used them to tabulate the 1890 census in 2.5 years. The 1880 census had taken seven years. He started his own business in 1896 when he founded 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, the first Key punch (i.e. a punch that was operated from a keyboard) allowing a skilled operator to punch 200–300 cards per hour and a tabulator. The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards. A wiring panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator allowed it to do different jobs without having to be rebuilt (the first step towards programming).These inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry.

International Business Machines

In 1911, four corporations, including Holleriths firm, merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR).^[3] Under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson, it was renamed IBM in 1924.

References

• Austrian, G.D. (1982). Herman Hollerith: The Forgotten Giant of Information Processing. Columbia. ISBN 0231051468. 
• Hollerith, Herman (1890). In connection with the electric tabulation system which has been adopted by U.S. government for the work of the census bureau. Ph.D. dissertation. Columbia University School of Mines. 
• Hollerith, H. (April 1889). "An Electric Tabulating System". The Quarterly, Columbia University School of Mines X (16): 238-255.
• Hollerith, Herman (Dec 1894). "The Electric Tabulating Machine". Journal of the Royal Statistical Association 57 (4): 678-682.

External links

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

• Hollerith's patents from 1889: U.S. Patent 395,781  U.S. Patent 395,782  U.S. Patent 395,783 
• Computer History Museum: Hollerith 1889 patent
• IBM Archives: Herman Hollerith
• IBM Archives: Tabulating Machine Co. plant
• Early Office Museum: Punched Card Tabulating Machines
• Hollerith page at the National Hall of Fame
• Map to his gravesite
• Columbia University Computing History: Herman Hollerith
• "Inventor of the Week" biography at Lemelson-MIT Program site
• O'Connor, John J; Edmund F. Robertson "Herman Hollerith". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.  
• The Norwegian Historical Data Center: Census 1900 Includes a description of the use of Hollerith machines ("complicated, American enumeration machines"), together with illustrations.

Notes

1. ^ Lucia Beverley Talcott. RootsWeb. Retrieved on 2007-01-18.
2. ^ 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, 32. 
3. ^ IBM Archives: Frequently Asked Questions. 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.

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.