Herman Hollerith

Hollerith was born on February 29, 1860 — a leap-year baby — in Buffalo, to a German immigrant schoolteacher and Lutheran minister. He entered City College of New York at 15 in 1875, then finished a mining engineering degree at Columbia's School of Mines in 1879, at 19. The Census Bureau put him to work on the 1880 population count, where the physician and librarian John Shaw Billings reportedly told him someone ought to build a machine for tallying it. Hollerith spent several years teaching mechanical engineering at MIT while he worked out how, then moved to Washington, D.C., to finish the answer: a system of holes punched into cards, read by electrical contact, one card per person.

He patented the tabulator on January 8, 1889, calling it the ''Art of Compiling Statistics,'' and won a Census Bureau trial against two rival systems — his machine could process about 7,000 cards a day, at least ten times faster than counting by hand. It processed the 1890 census, nearly 63 million people, in about six years, against eight years for a smaller population in 1880. Hollerith kept the patents and rented the equipment rather than sell it outright, built the same system for censuses in Austria, Canada, Norway, Russia and Cuba, then sold it into private industry — railroads costing freight, above all. He founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 to run the licensing business himself, and in 1911, at 51, it merged with three other firms into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.

The merger did not serve him well. Thomas Watson arrived at CTR to run the sales side and did not get along with an inventor who considered the tabulator his own and did not care to be managed. Hollerith left the company not long after Watson took hold, having taken 1.2 million dollars for his shares in the 1911 deal — real money, and also an ending he had not chosen for himself. CTR became International Business Machines in 1924, carrying Watson's name and Watson's sales culture into the history books, while the punched card underneath the entire business — the one Hollerith had patented in January 1889 and defended against two rival systems in a government trial — is usually treated in that history as a detail from before the story really starts.

Hollerith died of a heart attack on November 17, 1929, in Washington, D.C., and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, not far from where he had built his first machines. He did not live to see the company he started become the dominant force in American computing, and his name survived less as a company than as a unit of measure: programmers for decades called an 80-column punch card a Hollerith card, and some computer languages still call a fixed-length character string a Hollerith constant. The Census Bureau he rescued from an eight-year backlog now credits him, without much dispute among historians, as the reason automated data processing exists at all.

Herman Hollerith's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Art of Compiling Statistics patent
  U.S. Patent 395,782, granted January 8, 1889, for the punched-card tabulator 1889
• 1890 United States census mission
  Processed nearly 63 million records in about 6 years, versus 8 for a smaller count in 1880 1890
• Tabulating Machine Company company
  Rented rather than sold the machines, on the licensing model IBM later kept 1896
• Railroad freight-cost tabulation systems invention
  Among his first private-sector customers outside government census work 1895
• Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company company
  Formed from the merger of his firm with 3 others, renamed IBM in 1924 1911

• February 29, 1860 aged 0 Born in Buffalo to German immigrant parents
• 1875 aged ~15 Enters City College of New York at 15
• 1879 aged ~19 Graduates the Columbia School of Mines at 19
• January 8, 1889 aged 28 Patents the punched-card tabulating machine
• 1890 aged ~30 His machines process the U.S. census
• 1896 aged ~36 Founds the Tabulating Machine Company
• 1911 aged ~51 Merges his firm into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company for 1.2 million dollars
• 1914 aged ~54 Leaves the company after Thomas Watson arrives to run it
• November 17, 1929 aged 69 Dies of a heart attack in Washington, D.C.

• Thomas J. Watson Sr. 1874–1956
  Executive who built IBM into the dominant punched-card and business-machine company before the computer age. displaced him at the company he founded
• Howard Aiken 1900–1973
  Physicist and engineer who designed the Harvard Mark I, an early electromechanical computer. extended punch-card computing
• Grace Hopper 1906–1992
  Computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who helped develop early programming languages and computing. computing heir