Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith
Birthday	Wednesday, February 29, 1860
Birthplace	Buffalo, New York
Died	Sunday, November 17, 1929
Occupation	Statistician, inventor, businessman
Education	City College of New York (1875) Columbia University School of Mines (1879)
Known for	mechanical tabulation of punched card data

Hollerith, Herman

(hō`lərĭth), 1860–1929, American inventor, b. Buffalo, N.Y. After graduating from Columbia Univ. (B.S., 1879), he worked on the U.S. Census of 1880. Intrigued by the problem of tabulating vast amounts of data, he developed over the next several years a card that could be represent data through a series of punched holes and a number of machines for punching and tabulating the cards. In 1896 Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company which, through mergers and acquisitions, grew into the International Business Machines Company.

Bibliography

See G. Austrian, Herman Hollerith (1982).

Hollerith, Herman

(1860–1929) engineer, computer inventor; born in Buffalo, N.Y. Working as a statistician for the U.S. census of 1880, he became aware of the need for automation in the recording and processing of vast amounts of data. Working first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then at the U.S. Patent Office (1884–90), he invented a tabulating machine that was fed data via electrical contacts controlled by the holes in punch cards. His machine won a contest for the best data-processing equipment for the U.S. census of 1890 and he organized the Tabulating Machine Company (1896) to make improved versions that soon were being used by other countries. His company merged with others to become the Computing–Tabulating–Recording Company (1911) which adopted the name of International Business Machines Corporation in 1924. Although he was early praised for revolutionizing statistical processing, it was only decades later that he was recognized as having anticipated the modern computer.

Herman Hollerith

(person)The promulgator of the punched card. Hollerith wasborn on 1860-02-29 and died on 1929-11-17. He graduated fromColumbia University, NewYork, NY, USA. He joined the USCensus Bureau as a statistician where he used a punched carddevice to help analyse the 1880 US census data. This punchedcard system stored data in 80 columns. This "80-column"concept has carried forward in various forms into modernapplications.

In 1896, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company toexploit his invention and in 1924 his firm became part ofIBM. The Hollerith system was used for the 1911 UK census.

A correspondant writes:

Wasn't Hollerith's original machine first used for the 1990 UScensus? And I think I am right in saying that the physicallayout was a 20x12 grid of round holes. The one I have seen(picture only, unfortunately, not the real thing) did not use'columns' as such but holes were grouped intoirregularly-shaped fields, such that each hole had amore-or-less independent function.

Herman Hollerith

(2)Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith

Hollerith, Herman

Bibliography

Hollerith, Herman

Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith

Synonyms for Herman Hollerith

noun United States inventor who invented a system for recording alphanumeric information on punched cards (1860-1929)

Synonyms