Herman Hollerith

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Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) was the inventor of the punched card tabulating machine-the precursor of the modern computer-and one of the founders of modern information processing. His machine was used to gather information for the 1890 census more efficiently. Hollerith's company later became part of International Business Machines (IBM).

Herman Hollerith was born to German immigrants, George and Franciska (Brunn) Hollerith, on February 29, 1860 in Buffalo, New York. He began his university education at the City College of New York at the age of 15, and graduated from the Columbia School of Mines with distinction in 1879. While at Columbia, Hollerith took the standard course of study which required both classes and practical work. As an engineering student, he took chemistry, physics, and geometry, as well as courses in surveying and graphics, and surveying and assaying. Hollerith was also required to visit local industries, such as metallurgical and machine shops, in order to understand how they functioned.

Shortly after graduation, Hollerith got a job at the U.S. Census Bureau as an assistant to his former teacher, William Petit Trowbridge. He worked as a statistician, compiling information on manufacturers. His article, "Report on the Statistics of Steam and Water-Power Used in the Manufacture of Iron and Steel," was published in 1888 in the Census Bureau's Report on Power and Machinery Employed in Manufacture. His work revealed the problems of dealing with large amounts of data by hand. The 1880 census took seven and a half years to complete. Because of the large numbers of people immigrating to the U.S., the 1890 and 1900 censuses were expected to take much longer.

At the Census Bureau, Hollerith met Kate Sherman Billings, daughter of Dr. John Shaw Billings, head of the Department of Vital Statistics. In addition to his work at the Bureau, Billings designed seven medical institutions and the New York Public Library, was chair of the Carnegie Institution, member of the National Board of Health, and oversaw publication of the Index Medicus, which contained abstracts of medical publications. Because Billings liked to help talented young men, and because Hollerith was dating his daughter, Billings took an interest in him.

It was Billings who was thought to have provided Hollerith with the inspiration for the punched card tabulating machine. Hollerith acknowledged near the end of his life the help that Billings had given him. While Billings denied providing much assistance, it is clear that he relied heavily on Billing's design concept. Hollerith thought he could design the machine, and later offered to include Billings in the project.

In 1882, Hollerith became an instructor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Because he disliked working with students, he left to go to St. Louis, Missouri, where he experimented with and designed an electrically activated brake system for railroads. The railroads, however, chose a steam-actuated brake system which had been designed by Westinghouse. In 1884, Hollerith got a job with the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., where he remained until 1890.

Invented the Tabulating Machine

Hollerith continued to experiment with the elements for a punched card tabulating machine. Billings had recommended that he study a Jacquard loom, a mechanical loom or weaving machine, for inspiration. Jacquard had realized that weaving required a number of repetitive tasks which could be automated. "He conceived a system that relied on stiff pasteboard cards with various patterns of punched holes. At each throw of the shuttle, a card was placed in the path of the rods. The pattern of holes in the card determined which rods could pass through and thus acted as a program for the loom. This control system allowed for flexibility and various levels of complexity in the patterns," noted Mark Russo, in The World's First Statistical Engineer.

From the Jacquard loom, Hollerith deduced the pattern for his first attempt at constructing his tabulating machine. He used a single, continuous paper feed with holes punched in it, something like a player piano. The position of the hole on a line of the paper determined what it stood for. For example, a hole in one position indicated a male, in another a female; a hole in another position indicated that the person was born in the U.S., one in another, the person was a foreigner. As the roll of paper was fed through the tabulating machine, the holes would pass over a drum, completing an electrical circuit for each hole. Counters connected to the machine registered each electrical current caused by a hole as a hit for that statistic. Because it used electricity, Hollerith's tabulating machine anticipated the advent of computers. Also, the hole punching system is analogous to the binary system of zeros and ones, which is found in the digital data storage of computers. The continuous strip which Hollerith initially used was similar to the tapes used in early computers.

The problems with Hollerith's continuous paper strip were that it was easy to tear, it was difficult to find a specific piece of information on the strip, and it was almost impossible to re-sort information. For these reasons, Hollerith decided to use a card similar to the Jacquard cards used on the looms. The cards, which came to be called Hollerith cards, were small stiff-paper cards, the size of one dollar bills. The advantage of the cards was their relatively small size, and the fact that they could be sorted or re-sorted, and corrected. The drum was replaced by a press which sandwiched the cards. Pins over the holes would pass through the cards to be submerged in mercury, which created electrical circuits that yielded hits on counters.

In 1884, Hollerith was awarded his first patent and a contract to test the merits of his new machine. In spite of some problems, the test of mortality statistics at the Baltimore Office of Registration was successful enough that the machine was subsequently used in New Jersey and New York City for similar purposes. In 1885, Hollerith's machine was first used by the U.S. Navy. This military use gave Hollerith added prestige, increased sales, and the financial resources needed to make improvements.

The 1880 census was still not completed by 1885. Hollerith felt that his machine would speed the counting of the 1890 census. The Census Bureau was worried that they might have to count two censuses at the same time, because of the length of time it took to count them. The Bureau held a competition which proved Hollerith's machine much faster than any of its competitors. By the time of the 1890 census, Hollerith had made more improvements. He increased the categories which the machine could count, and adding a mechanical feeding device and a sorting box with a number of compartments. With Hollerith's machine, the counting for the 1890 census was completed in six weeks. The census was finished in two and a half years rather than the seven and a half years needed for the previous one. Hollerith had saved the U.S. five million dollars in expenses.

On September 15, 1890, Hollerith married Lucia Beverly Talcott. The couple subsequently had six children: Lucia, Nannie, Virginia, Herman, Richard, and Charles. Also in 1890, he was awarded the Elliott Cresson medal from the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia for the outstanding invention of the year.

Expanded Uses of Machine

By 1891, Hollerith's machines were being used to gather census information in Canada, Austria, and Norway. Between 1890 and 1900, he expanded the commercial uses of his machines to include railroad freight statistics and agricultural data. In 1896, Hollerith started the Tabulating Machine Company, to make his machines and sell the cards needed for them. Although business was good, Hollerith was suffering from emotional exhaustion. His employees never knew what he was going to do next. It was rumoured that he had extra strong doors installed in his home so that they would not fly off their hinges during his fits. His emotional state led to a falling out with the director of the census, which now handled much more statistical data for the government. After this incident, Hollerith devoted himself entirely to commercial work.

Never a man to leave things as they were, Hollerith immediately found new markets for his machines in the business world. Within 18 days after his machines were removed from the Census Bureau, he had placed them at the shops of the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad and at the Denver Gas & Electric Co. Between 1905 and 1909, he substantially developed his business as he won over a number of large accounts and introduced an updated version of his machines.

In 1911, his company merged with two other companies, the Computing Scale Company of America and the International Time Recording Company, to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Hollerith stayed at the merged company as a consulting engineer until he retired in 1921. In 1924, under the leadership of Thomas Watson, Sr., the merged company changed its name to International Business Machines (IBM). The machine that Hollerith developed was the initial reason for IBM's success. In his last years, Hollerith suffered from heart disease. He died at home in Washington, D.C. on November 17, 1929.

Further Reading

Austrian, Geoffrey D., Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing, Columbia University Press, 1982.

Bruns, Leonard C., Science & Technology Firsts, Gale, 1997.

Debus, A.G., ed., World's Who's Who in Science, 1968.

Dictionary of American Biography, Volume XI, Supplement One.

Datamation, February 1982.

"The World's First Statistical Engineer," University of Rochester, Department of History, http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/hollerith/first.htm (March 17, 1999).

Herman Hollerith
Born	February 29, 1860(1860-02-29) Buffalo, New York
Died	November 17, 1929 (aged 69) Washington, DC
Resting place	Oak Hill Cemetery
Education	City College of New York (1875) Columbia University School of Mines (1879)
Occupation	Statistician, inventor, businessman
Known for	mechanical tabulation of punched card data
Spouse(s)	Lucia Beverley Talcott (1865–1944) (m. 1890–1929) «start: (1890-09-15)–end+1: (1930)»"Marriage: Lucia Beverley Talcott (1865–1944) to Herman Hollerith" Location: (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith)

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. He was the founder of the company that became IBM.

Contents 1 Personal life 2 Electronic tabulation of data 3 Inventions and businesses 4 See also 5 Notes 6 Further reading 7 External links

Personal life

Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York and spent his early childhood there. He 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. Herman Hollerith spent most of his life in Buffalo and did many inventions there.

Electronic tabulation of data

At the urging of John Shaw Billings^[1], Hollerith developed a mechanism to make electrical connections trigger a counter to record information. A key idea was that data could be coded numerically. Hollerith saw that if numbers could be punched in specified locations on a card, in the now familiar rows and columns, then the cards could be counted or sorted mechanically and the data recorded. A description of this system, An Electric Tabulating System (1889), was submitted by Hollerith to Columbia University as his doctoral thesis, and is reprinted in Randell's book.^[2] On January 8, 1889, Hollerith was issued U.S. Patent 395,782^[3], claim 2 of which reads:

The herein-described method of compiling statistics, which consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holes 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.

Inventions and businesses

Hollerith punched card

Hollerith had left teaching and begun working for the United States Census Office in the year he filed his first patent application. Titled "Art of Compiling Statistics", it was filed on September 23, 1884; U.S. Patent No. 395782 was granted on January 8, 1889.^[4]

Hollerith built machines under contract for the Census Office, which used them to tabulate the 1890 census in only one year.^[5] The 1880 census had taken eight years. Hollerith then started his own business in 1896, founding 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 and the first key punch (i.e. a punch that was operated from a keyboard), which allowed a skilled operator to punch 200–300 cards per hour. He also invented a tabulator. The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate only on 1890 Census cards. A control 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.

In 1911, four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, merged to form the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR).^[6] Under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson, it was renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924.

See also

• Hollerith constant
• Tabulating machine
• Punched card
• Joseph Marie Jacquard

Notes

1. ^ 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. pp. 32. 
2. ^ Randell (ed.), Brian (1982). The Origins of Digital Computers, Selected Papers, 3rd ed. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-11319-3. 
3. ^ See U.S. Patent 395,782
4. ^ The Invention and Development of the Hollerith Punched Card
5. ^ Hollerith's Electric Sorting and Tabulating Machine, ca. 1895 from the American Memory archives of the Library of Congress
6. ^ "IBM Archives: Frequently Asked Questions" (PDF). http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/documents/pdf/faq.pdf.  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.

Further reading

• Austrian, G.D. (1982). Herman Hollerith: The Forgotten Giant of Information Processing. Columbia. ISBN 0231051468. 
• Heide, Lars (2009). Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880-1945. Johns Hopkins. ISBN 0801891434. 

• Essinger, James (2004). Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

• 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. http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/hh/index.html. 
• Hollerith, Herman (December 1894). "The Electric Tabulating Machine". Journal of the Royal Statistical Association 57 (4): 678–682. doi:10.2307/2979610. 

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
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "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.
• "$8.5 Million And Counting". Washington Post. March 5, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7878-2005Mar4.html.  – Hollerith's house

Persondata
NAME	Hollerith, Herman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	statistician, inventor, businessman
DATE OF BIRTH	February 29, 1860(1860-02-29)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Buffalo, New York
DATE OF DEATH	November 17, 1929
PLACE OF DEATH

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