Diff — Herman Hollerith

**Herman Hollerith** (29 February 1860 – 17 November 1929) was an American statistician and inventor whose **[[Punched card|punched-card]] tabulating machine** processed the 1890 US census — the moment punched cards moved from controlling looms to processing *data*, and the seed from which **[[IBM]]** grew.

# The census problem

The US Constitution demands a census every ten years — and the 1880 count took nearly a decade to process by hand, finishing just in time to start the next one. Hollerith, a Columbia-trained engineer who had worked on that census, saw the wall approaching: the 1890 census would overflow a decade.

His solution encoded each person's answers as holes in a card at fixed positions — age, sex, occupation, birthplace — and ran the cards through a tabulator whose spring pins dipped into mercury cups wherever a hole let them through, closing a circuit and clicking a counter dial. Clerks could also sort cards mechanically into bins. The machine did not compute like a computer; it *counted and sorted* — the dawn of data processing.

The 1890 census was tabulated in about **two and a half years** — years ahead of schedule — and Hollerith won contracts across the United States and abroad.

# From Tabulating Machine Company to IBM

In 1896 Hollerith founded the **Tabulating Machine Company**, leasing machines and — crucially — selling cards by the million. The business model (machines plus consumable cards) made the company durable, and in 1911 it merged with three others into the **Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company**. In **1924** CTR was renamed **International Business Machines — IBM**.

IBM's **80-column card**, introduced in 1928, became the worldwide standard that carried [[Punched card|punched cards]] through the entire mainframe era — the card format FORTRAN programmers punched statements onto until the 1970s.

# Legacy

- Hollerith's machine is why "information processing" exists as an industry at all — governments and railways had data long before they had computers, and his tabulator was the bridge.

- The card fields, the counting dials, and the machine-readable record all descend from his census work — and the medium itself from the [[Jacquard Loom|Jacquard loom]]'s instruction decks.

- He won a Columbia doctorate for the tabulator, retired to a farm in Maryland, and lived to see his company become IBM — the rare inventor who profited from a genuinely foundational idea.

# See also

- [[Punched card]]

- [[Jacquard Loom]]

- [[History of Programming]]

# References

3. Truesdell, Leon E. *The Development of Punch Card Tabulation in the Bureau of the Census* (GPO, 1965).

[[Category:History]]

[[Category:People]]