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Herman Hollerith

(1860-1929)

Herman Hollerith (, – , ) was an who developed a mechanical system based on to rapidly tabulate statistics from thousands and millions of data.

Personal Life

He was born on February 29, 1860 in Buffalo, New York to Johann George Hollerith (1808-1869); and Franciska Brunn, both of . He graduated from , with a bachelor's 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 the . In 1890 he married Lucia Beverley Talcott (1865-?) of Vera Cruz, Mexico and they had six children. He died in 1929 of a heart attack and was buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, Virginia.

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Electronic tabulation of statistical data

Hollerith spent 1882 on the Mechanical Engineering faculty at . During that year he developed a prototype of a system for storing data on punched cards which was partly inspired by the system used by railroad conductors in which holes punched in various places on a passenger's ticket identified the holder's passenger status. Urged on by , he 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) was that all personal data could be coded numerically. Hollerith saw that the numbers could be punched in specified column on the cards, the cards sorted mechanically, and the appropriate columns totalled. He described his idea in Patent No. 395,782 of January 8, 1889 as follows:

The herein described method of compiling statistics which consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holed punched in sheets of electrically non-conducting material, and bearing a specific relation to each other and to a standard, and then counting or tallying such statistical items separately or in combination by means of mechanical counters operated by electro-magnets the circuits through which are controlled by the perforated sheets, substantially as and for the purpose set forth.

Tabulating Machine Company

He built machines under contract for the , which used them to tabulate the 1890 census in much less time than the 1880 census. He started his own business in 1896 when he founded . 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