Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith was an American inventor and statistician who developed punched-card tabulating machines that accelerated processing of the 1890 United States census.

Punched card: A card that stores information through holes arranged in predefined positions. Hollerith encoded census answers as hole patterns on cards.
Hollerith machine: An electromechanical punched-card system for recording, sorting, and tabulating statistical information. This is the apparatus Hollerith designed for census tabulation.
1880 United States census: The decennial enumeration of the United States population conducted in 1880. Its lengthy tabulation helped motivate faster methods for the next census.
Tabulating Machine Company: An American company founded by Hollerith to manufacture and lease punched-card data-processing equipment. Hollerith commercialized his invention through this company.
William Petty: A seventeenth-century English economist and statistician who promoted quantitative study of populations and society. Petty’s political arithmetic preceded Hollerith’s mechanized treatment of population data.
Tabulating machine: A mechanical or electromechanical device that organizes and counts data. Hollerith’s invention automated the tabulation of census records.
Electrical contact: A conductive connection that allows electric current to pass between components. Pins passing through card holes completed circuits in Hollerith’s reader.
1890 United States census: The eleventh decennial census of the United States, conducted in 1890. Hollerith’s tabulating system was used to process its population data.
International Business Machines: An American technology company that developed from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. The company’s corporate lineage includes Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company.
John Shaw Billings: An American physician and librarian who directed the United States Census Office’s vital statistics work. Billings encouraged Hollerith to address the census tabulation problem.

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