On this day in New York · February 29, 1860
Herman Hollerith Is Born in Buffalo, Leap Day Baby Who Built the Punch Card
A German immigrant's son from Buffalo grew up to build the machine that let the government count 63 million Americans without waiting eight years to see the results, and his little company eventually became IBM.
The facts
- Born
- February 29, 1860, in Buffalo, New York
- Father
- Georg Hollerith, a German immigrant, Lutheran minister and Forty-eighter from Rhineland-Palatinate
- 1890 census result
- Cut the time to process the census from eight years, for 1880, to six years, for 1890
- Company lineage
- Founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896; it merged into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911, renamed IBM in 1924
Herman Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, on leap day, February 29, 1860, the son of Georg Hollerith, a German immigrant, Lutheran minister, and refugee of the failed 1848 revolutions who taught school after he landed in New York State. Herman went on to Columbia University's School of Mines, where he later wrote his thesis on an electric tabulating system, and by the mid-1880s he had worked out a way to record a fact as nothing more than a hole punched in a specific spot on a card. The Census Office hired him to apply that idea to the 1890 census, and machines that sorted and counted those punched cards by electrical contact did in a fraction of the time what an army of clerks with tally sheets used to do by hand. In 1896 he turned the idea into a company, the Tabulating Machine Company, which he ran out of Washington, D.C. In 1911 that firm merged with three others into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which was renamed International Business Machines in 1924.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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A key idea was that a datum could be recorded by the presence or absence of a hole at a specific location on a card.
From the Wikipedia article on Herman Hollerith, describing the core idea behind his tabulating system
Source: Wikipedia -
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
From Hollerith's own patent claim, as quoted in the Wikipedia article on Herman Hollerith
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Every time a database or a spreadsheet sorts your information into rows and columns, it is running on the idea a Buffalo-born engineer proved on the 1890 census: that a fact can be reduced to a hole in the right place and machines can do the counting. The company he started is the same one that still runs a good chunk of the world's back-office computing today.
Sources
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