Hollerith: A Pioneer in Computing

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Hollerith A Pioneer in Computing
Tabulating Machine
Hollerith wins Census Bureau Contest
Hollerith participated the contest with his
tabulating machine and won the contract. His
competitors machines took, on average, 50 hours
to compile the data, while he took a little more
than five hours. Holleriths machine completed
the 12th census in 1890 in six weeks instead of
the predicted 10 years, and the data was much
more detailed than any previous census. With
this reduction of working hours Hollerith saved
the Census Bureau about 5 million. In 1890,
Hollerith founded a company named the Tabulating
Machine Company, TMC. In 1911, his company merged
with two other companies named the Computing
Tabulating Recording Company. In 1924, this
company changed its name to International
Business Machines, IBM. Herman Hollerith dies on
November 17, 1929 in Washington D.C. He was said
to be "The Worlds first statistical engineer"
and his techniques were used in census tabulating
well into the 1960s.
Holleriths Early Days.
Herman Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York on
February 29, 1860. His parents were German
immigrants. He attended the City College of New
York at the age of 15. When he was 19 he
graduated from the Columbia School of Mines. His
first job was at the U.S. Census Bureau in 1880.
Hollerith was also teaching mechanical
engineering at MIT, and working for the U.S.
Patent Office at the same time. At the end of
the nineteenth century, the population of the
United States was growing so rapidly that the
U.S Census Bureau had no methods to record the
next census in a timely fashion. Between 1880
and 1890, the population increased by more than
12 million people and it took 7 years for the
Census Bureaus to complete the 1880 census. It
was obsolete before it was completely tabulated.
As a solution, the U.S. Census Bureau held a
competition to find a new technique to tabulate
the census.
Holleriths final version for census calculating
machine included an automatic electrical
tabulating machine, which used punched cards as
data storage. It contained large number of
clock-like counters that accumulated the results.
Cards had several holes in it, so they were
called punched cards. Each punch on a card
represented one number, and combinations of two
punches represented one letter. As many as 80
variables could be stored on a single card.
Hollerith's machines proved themselves to be
extremely useful for a wide variety of
statistical applications, and some of the
techniques they used were to be significant in
the development of the digital computer.  

Prepared by Mary Kieu Kim Nguyen and Roger L.
Wainwright Spring, 2000