The Beginnings and
The Education:
Herman Hollerith's parents
immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1848.
They were fleeing political disturbances in Germany.
Hollerith
was a very bright child but he struggled very much
in the early stages of his schooling. His problems
were mostly spelling! Eventually Hollerith
was removed from school, and was tutored at home by
his Lutheran Minister.
His higher education
was a series of very outstanding successes. Herman
entered the City College of New York in 1875, and
studied advanced engineering at the Columbia School
of Mines in 1879. Hollerith
earned honors and also a distinction in his final
exams. He also impressed one of his instructors, Prof.
W P Towbridge. Towbridge like Hollerith
so much that he asked him to join him as his assistant
at the University of Columbia.
A Census Bureau in
Trouble:
Towbridge
was appointed Chief Special Agent to the Census Bureau,
he took Hollerith with
him as a statistician. Hollerith
was charged with solving the many problems of analyzing
the many amounts of of data that was flowing in to
the bureau.
The US Bureau of Census
was in deep trouble, the process of collecting and
analyzing of the information was taking too long to
process! The Government needed a quicker way of doing
all this. The exact origin of the idea of the Tabulating
machine that was created by Herman Hollerith is not
known. But some speculate that it came from a co-worker
of Herman's at the Census Bureau, Dr. John Shaw Billings.
Hollerith was once quoted as saying" One evening
at Dr. B's tea table he said to me 'There ought to
be a machine for doing the purely mechanical work
of tabulating population and similar statistics'."
Dr. Billings was also known to have commented on the
idea of the use of a Jacquard loom process. This involved
the use of punch cards to process the information
that was punched in to it.
In 1882, Herman was
teaching mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. While he worked there, he
started to experiment with a jacquard loom, trying
to see if if the loom could be used for Census work.
Hollerith found that the loom really wasn't applicable
to storage of data. So Hollerith decided to design
that used hole-punch tape to record and to also read
the punched data.
The Punch Card machine
worked but it had several drawbacks. The drawbacks
reduced the speed such as the need for the tape to
stop and a metal pin had to pass through the tape.
Hollerith decided that Punch Cards would be a solution
to the problem. The cards would allow him to store
Census data more easily. Hollerith got the idea of
using cards from a train conductor, as the conductor
hole punched the passengers tickets.
The Census Bureau
Saved:
Hollerith's series of Punch card devises were used
in New Jersey and New York City for Tabulating mortality
statistics and all turned out fine. The Census Bureau
held trial runs of three candidates processing machines,
but the clear winner was Hollerith. Hollerith then
moved very quickly to card punching and other counting
devices to be manufactured.
By June 1890 all was ready and Hollerith began work
when the first census data arrived at the Census Bureau
in September. All of the counting was finished in
only six weeks but the results were rechecked in case
of error and held back until December to keep the
public reassured. Instead of years, it only took Hollerith
three months to complete the tabulation of the Census.
The population was determined to be 62,622,250 that
year.
The 1890 census took advantage of the speed of the
Cards that were invented by Hollerith. The cards also
allowed the Bureau to collect new information that
was impossible before like the number of Children
still alive in the families and the number of people
that could speak English in the household. The Government
estimated the savings of using Hollerith's system
to be around 5 million dollars. Other countries caught
on to this new system of running a census, and so
Canada, Norway, and Austria used Holleriths system
in their 1891 censuses and in 1911 the UK joined the
bandwagon.
How did Hollerith's cards work?:
The Numeric data that was punched onto the cards were
represented by a single hole in a particular area
of the cards. All the letters of the alphabet can
be represented by the combination of two different
punched holes in the same column. Hollerith's original
design only had room for twenty-four with twelve rows
for the holes in each column to be punched. Hollierith's
final version had eighty columns, and allowing up
to as many as eighty different variables to be stored
on each card. The punched cards were read by the Hollerith
machine but only one card at a time but it was very
quick. When each of the punched cards were processed
a small pin would fall all the way through each of
the holes into a pan that was full of mercury, this
would cause an electrical circuit to form and the
count was registered on the meter.
On to the Business World:
Hollerith didn't like to teach and tried
to find a job in Industry. In 1884, Hollerith took
a job in the US Patent Office in Washington, DC. Hollerith
gained very valuable information abbot patents, applying
for and did receive patents for his card processing
machine 1884. Hollerith continued to create patents
and his total was thirty different patents from the
United States. In 1990, Hollerith set his price for
the use of his machines so high that cost more than
it would to do the census by hand. The next year,
the Census Bureau decided to develop their own system
of counting. The bureau had to rush to even meet the
deadline of the next census.
The Future of Hollerith's Company:
Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company became
the Computer Tabulating Recording Company in 1911
but soon the market for counting machines was lost.
Hollerith then formed a new company called TMC, which
stands for Tabulator Machine Company, which produced
his card systems that could be used in business accounting
and inventory of railroad car. After several megers,
the company finaly became the company known as IBM
which means Internationa Buisiness Machines.
in 1929 only eight years after Hollerith Retired,
he died of a heart.
