Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) was an American inventor and statistician, born in Buffalo, New York, who earned an engineering degree from Columbia in 1879. He joined the U.S. Census Bureau in the early 1880s, where the sheer volume of hand-tabulated data, the 1880 census took most of a decade to process, convinced him there had to be a faster way. He went on to invent an electric tabulating system based on punched cards.
On 8 January 1889 Hollerith received a patent for his electro-mechanical tabulating machine. Census clerks transferred each person’s answers onto a punched card; a reading machine pressed pins against the card, and where a hole let a pin through, an electric circuit advanced a counting dial. His system won the Census Bureau’s competition decisively and was used to process the 1890 census, completing the basic population count far faster than hand methods allowed. In 1896 Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which in 1911 merged with three others; that combined firm was renamed International Business Machines, IBM, in 1924.
For the library’s reader, Hollerith marks the moment mechanized data processing first proved itself on a real, consequential task. The punched-card method he commercialized became the backbone of business and government computing for more than half a century, well into the electronic era. His company’s growth into IBM connects the very beginnings of automated data handling to the firm that would dominate the early computer industry.