Who is herman hollerith

This process triggered mechanical counters and sorter bins and tabulated the appropriate data. Hollerith's system including punch, tabulator, and sorter allowed the official census count to be tallied in six months; in another two years all of the census data was completed and defined. His later machines mechanized the card-feeding process, adding numbers, and sorted cards, in addition to merely counting data.

Induction Event Collegiate Inventors Event. His unconventional character and violent temper made it more and more difficult to run the company, with the result that it was sold to the Computer Tabulating Recording Company in , a company that was renamed as the International Business Machines Corporation IBM in He acted as a consultant for the company for some years, but finally withdrew into private life.

Herman Hollerith Replica of the first Hollerith machine consisting of a pantograph punch, contact mechanism, counters, and sorter.

The punched card: A revolutionary data career He developed his idea of an electrical counting and sorting system in , while working for the U. More information Punched card systems - Early days of data processing. Hall of Fame. Visiting General information. X We use Cookies solely for statistical purposes and for the necessary operation of the site.

We use Matomo and anonymize the IP address. His supervisor, William P. Trowbridge, who was a consultant to the US Bureau of the Census, introduced Hollerith to John Shaw Billings, who employed him as an assistant in his work on the statistical analysis of the census.

Billings remarked that there ought to some way to mechanize the tabulating process. Following this early involvement with the bureau, Hollerith moved to MIT [Then called the Boston Institute of Technology and not yet moved across the river to Cambridge. A year later he returned to Washington to become an examiner for the Patent Office. During this period at MIT he developed the basic ideas of the tabulating machine, using rolls of perforated paper tape as the means of input.

Replacing the continuous tape by cards, Hollerith also developed a pantograph punch for preparing the data on the cards, and a "reader" in which spring loaded pins completed electrical circuits to increment selected counters in the tabulator.

In response to a request for bids to automate the tabulation of the data collected during the census with the hope of completing the analysis of the data before the census even in the face of an increased number of questions, Hollerith proposed his card processing system.

The new system proved to be a success, and the time to completion of the data analysis was reduced to one third of that for the hand-counted census.