Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith
Born	Template:Birth date Buffalo, New York, U.S.
Died	November 17, 1929(1929-11-17) (aged 69) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Occupation(s)	Statistician, inventor, entrepreneur
Known for	Inventing electromechanical tabulating machine using punched cards; founding Tabulating Machine Company (later part of IBM)

Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician, inventor, and entrepreneur who created an electromechanical tabulating machine utilizing punched cards to process data and facilitate accounting tasks. His patented punched card tabulator from 1884 initiated the era of mechanized binary coding and semi-automated data processing systems, which dominated this domain for nearly one hundred years.

Hollerith established a company that later merged in 1911 with others to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. This entity was renamed "International Business Machines" (IBM) in 1924, evolving into one of the most significant and prosperous corporations of the twentieth century. He is acknowledged as a trailblazer in the field of data processing.

Biography

Originating from Buffalo, New York, Hollerith was the son of Georg Hollerith, a German immigrant and educator from Großfischlingen, Rhineland-Palatinate. He enrolled at City College of New York in 1875 and earned an Engineer of Mines degree from the Columbia School of Mines in 1879 at age 19. In 1890, he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree based on his innovations in tabulating systems.

Beginning in 1882, Hollerith served as a mechanical engineering instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he started working with punched cards. He later moved to Washington, D.C., residing in Georgetown near the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, close to his business premises now honored by an IBM plaque. He passed away from a heart attack at age 69.

Electromechanical tabulation of data

Prompted by John Shaw Billings, Hollerith devised a system employing electrical circuits to increment counters for recording data. A crucial breakthrough involved representing information through holes punched at designated positions on cards. For instance, a hole signifying "married" in a marital status field contrasted with no hole indicating "single." He demonstrated that arranging data in rows and columns on such cards enabled electromechanical counting and sorting. His approach, detailed in An Electric Tabulating System (1889), formed his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. On January 8, 1889, U.S. Patent 395,782 was granted to Hollerith for his method of compiling statistics using punched cards combined with electromechanical counters.

The method described herein involves recording individual statistical items by punching holes or combinations thereof into sheets of electrically non-conductive material... followed by counting or tallying these items separately or collectively through mechanical counters actuated by electromagnets controlled via circuits regulated by the perforated sheets...

Inventions and businesses

After departing academia, Hollerith joined the United States Census Bureau and submitted his initial patent application titled "Art of Compiling Statistics" on September 23, 1884; the patent (U.S. Patent 395,782) was awarded in 1889.

He operated under the name The Hollerith Electric Tabulating System, focusing on manufacturing punched card data processing devices. His machinery was contracted for use in the 1890 census, drastically reducing processing duration from eight years (as required for the 1880 census) to six years despite greater population size and increased data complexity.

In 1896, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company (renamed The Tabulating Machine Company in 1905). His equipment was leased globally for census operations and adopted by leading insurance firms. Nations employing his technology included England & Wales, Italy, Germany, Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, as well as for the subsequent 1900 U.S. census.

Among his innovations were the first automatic card-feed mechanism and keypunch device. The original 1890 Tabulator was configured specifically for census cards; later versions introduced plugboards (control panels), enabling flexible rewiring for diverse applications—this advancement laid the groundwork for modern data processing. His punched cards continued as standard input/output media for almost a century.

In 1911, Hollerith’s enterprise merged with three others to create the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). Under Thomas J. Watson’s direction, CTR was renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924. By 1933, The Tabulating Machine Company had been fully integrated into IBM.

Death and legacy

Herman Hollerith passed away on November 17, 1929, and his final resting place is at Oak Hill Cemetery located in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

The terms Hollerith card and Hollerith strings and constants were coined in his honor, underscoring his enduring influence on the evolution of data processing technologies.

Among his descendants are notable figures such as the Rt. Rev. Herman Hollerith IV, who served as the Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Southern Virginia, and Randolph Marshall Hollerith, who holds the position of dean at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

See also

• Unit record equipment
• History of IBM

Further reading

• Ashurst, Gareth. Pioneers of Computing, Frederick Muller, 1983, pp. 77–90.
• Beniger, James R. (1986/2009). The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Harvard University Press, pp. 390–425.
• Cortada, James W. Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, & Remington Rand & the Industry they created, 1865–1956, Princeton, 1993, p. 344.
• Essinger, James. Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age, Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Engelbourg, Saul. International Business Machines: A Business History, Columbia University PhD dissertation, 1954; reprinted by Arno Press, 1976.
• Heide, Lars. "Herman Hollerith" in Jeffrey Fear (ed.), Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, German Historical Institute, 2017.
• Heide, Lars. Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
• Hollerith, Herman. "An Electric Tabulating System," The Quarterly, Columbia University School of Mines, April 1889, pp. 238–255.
• Hollerith, Herman. "The Electrical Tabulating Machine," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 57, no. 4, December 1894, pp. 678–682.

External links

• Herman Hollerith (2017) In Immigrant Entrepreneurship by Lars Heide; German Historical Institute.
• Hollerith's patents from 1889:
• Columbia University Computing History: Herman Hollerith and Hollerith's 1890 Census Tabulator
• IBM Archives: Herman Hollerith (archived)
• The Tabulating Machine Co. plant (archived)
• Early Office Museum: Punched Card Tabulating Machines
• Research notes on Herman Hollerith at Hagley Museum and Library
• Herman Hollerith papers at the Library of Congress
• Richard Hollerith Papers at Hagley Museum and Library
• Fleishman, Sandra. "$8.5 Million And Counting," The Washington Post, March 5, 2005 – on Hollerith's house