Hollerith: A Pioneer in Computing

1. Hollerith: A Pioneer in Computing Hollerith wins Census Bureau Contest Tabulating Machine Hollerith participated the contest with his tabulating machine and won the contract. His competitors’ machines took, on average, 50 hours to compile the data, while he took a little more than five hours. Hollerith’s machine completed the 12th census in 1890 in six weeks instead of the predicted 10 years, and the data was much more detailed than any previous census. With this reduction of working hours Hollerith saved the Census Bureau about $5 million. In 1890, Hollerith founded a company named the Tabulating Machine Company, TMC. In 1911, his company merged with two other companies named the Computing Tabulating Recording Company. In 1924, this company changed its name to International Business Machines, IBM. Herman Hollerith dies on November 17, 1929 in Washington D.C. He was said to be "The World’s first statistical engineer" and his techniques were used in census tabulating well into the 1960s. Hollerith’s Early Days. Herman Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York on February 29, 1860. His parents were German immigrants. He attended the City College of New York at the age of 15. When he was 19 he graduated from the Columbia School of Mines. His first job was at the U.S. Census Bureau in 1880. Hollerith was also teaching mechanical engineering at MIT, and working for the U.S. Patent Office at the same time. At the end of the nineteenth century, the population of the United States was growing so rapidly that the U.S Census Bureau had no methods to record the next census in a timely fashion. Between 1880 and 1890, the population increased by more than 12 million people and it took 7 years for the Census Bureaus to complete the 1880 census. It was obsolete before it was completely tabulated. As a solution, the U.S. Census Bureau held a competition to find a new technique to tabulate the census. Hollerith’s final version for census calculating machine included an automatic electrical tabulating machine, which used punched cards as data storage. It contained large number of clock-like counters that accumulated the results. Cards had several holes in it, so they were called punched cards. Each punch on a card represented one number, and combinations of two punches represented one letter. As many as 80 variables could be stored on a single card. Hollerith's machines proved themselves to be extremely useful for a wide variety of statistical applications, and some of the techniques they used were to be significant in the development of the digital computer. Prepared by Mary Kieu Kim Nguyen and Roger L. Wainwright Spring, 2000