In our modern digital world, we take for granted the ability to quickly process and analyze vast amounts of data with computers. But the origins of automatic data processing go back over 130 years to the pioneering work of one man: Herman Hollerith. An eccentric genius and shrewd businessman, Hollerith invented the first tabulating machines that used punch cards to input and process data. His machines helped usher in the era of modern information technology, and laid the foundations for everything from IBM to the Big Data revolution. This is his story.
The Birth of a Prodigy
Herman Hollerith was born on February 29, 1860, in Buffalo, New York, the youngest of six children in a German immigrant family. His father, Johann Georg Hollerith, was an intellectual and political activist who had fled to America after the failed Revolutions of 1848 in Germany. In Buffalo, Johann found work as a professor and inventor, instilling in his children a love of knowledge and tinkering.
Tragedy struck the family when Herman was just 9 years old. Johann died from injuries sustained in a carriage accident, leaving Herman‘s mother Franciska to raise the children alone. A proud and principled woman, Franciska made ends meet by making and selling fashionable hats. Her determined self-reliance in the face of hardship would be a major influence on young Herman.
At school, Herman was a precocious but troublesome student. According to one story, he so disliked spelling lessons that he once jumped out of a second-story window to avoid them! But Herman excelled in math and engineering, and at age 15 he enrolled at the City College of New York. He later transferred to the renowned Columbia School of Mines, where he graduated with an engineering degree in 1879 at the top of his class.
An Engineering Prodigy Meets a Census in Crisis
Fresh out of Columbia, Hollerith caught his big break thanks to a well-connected professor, William Trowbridge. Trowbridge was consulting for the U.S. Census Office, which was facing a daunting challenge. The U.S. population was booming, and the 1880 census was drowning in paperwork. Clerks needed most of a decade to tabulate the results of the 1870 census, and the 1880 data would be even more overwhelming.
Trowbridge brought Hollerith on board to find a better way. At just 19, Hollerith joined a special team tasked with mechanizing the census data processing. He quickly made his mark with a series of inventions to record and tabulate data with electrical and mechanical devices.
Hollerith‘s work drew inspiration from earlier inventors like Charles Babbage, the English mathematician who designed the first programmable computer in the 1830s. But while Babbage‘s machines were purely mechanical, Hollerith brought electrical innovation. His tabulating systems used punch cards to input data, which could then be read by spring-mounted pins that passed through the holes to complete circuits and increment counters.
When the 1890 census rolled around, Hollerith‘s machines were ready for a major test. Census workers used special keypunch machines to record data about every person counted, from their age and occupation to their health, on individual punch cards. The cards were then fed into Hollerith‘s tabulating machines, where the holes were detected and the data compiled.
The results were astonishing. Thanks to Hollerith‘s machines, the 1890 census was completed in just one year, compared to eight years for the 1880 census. A single tabulating machine could process 7,000 punch cards per day, with each card holding up to 288 bits of data. In total, Hollerith‘s machines processed 62,622,250 cards for the 1890 census.
"The apparatus works as unerringly as the mills of the Gods, but beats them hollow as to speed."
-New York World, describing Hollerith‘s machines at the 1890 census
Hollerith‘s success instantly made him a celebrity in the emerging world of data processing. His machines were soon adopted by countries around the world for their own censuses, from Canada and Norway to Austria and Russia. He won the contract again for the 1900 U.S. census, where his machines proved their worth by processing data 10 times faster than in 1890.
The Birth of IBM
Hollerith was as savvy a businessman as he was an inventor. In 1896, he founded the Tabulating Machine Company to commercialize his inventions, and aggressively pursued patents to lock out competitors. Rather than selling his machines outright, Hollerith leased them to customers, who then had to buy the punch cards needed to use them. It was a business model that would serve tech giants like IBM very well in the decades to come.
Hollerith found eager customers far beyond the Census Bureau. Railroads used his machines to track freight and monitor efficiency. Factories tallied their output and payroll on his tabulators. Insurance companies, utilities, and department stores all clamored to adopt Hollerith‘s system for their growing mounds of data.
But Hollerith‘s relentless drive didn‘t always serve him well. He had a reputation as a brilliant but difficult man, feuding with the director of the Census Bureau and driving away top employees. After bitter negotiations, Hollerith lost the 1910 census contract to a rival system from former employee James Powers.
Despite the setback, Hollerith‘s company continued to thrive and expand into new markets. In 1911, it merged with several other manufacturers to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or CTR. Though Hollerith stayed on as a consulting engineer, he grew less involved in the day-to-day business. When CTR changed its name to International Business Machines in 1924, Hollerith had long since faded into the background.
"Hollerith was the king of the tabulators, but he was also his own worst enemy. His ego and his temper cost him the Census Bureau, but he still had the vision to build an industry."
-Technology historian James W. Cortada
Hollerith‘s Later Years and Legacy
After his early success, Hollerith settled into a quiet family life. In 1890 he married Lucia Talcott, and the couple had six children together. Hollerith indulged his love of the finer things, from racing horses to fine cigars. But most of all, he loved his record-setting herd of Guernsey cattle, which he raised on a farm in rural Maryland after retiring there in 1921.
On November 17, 1929, Herman Hollerith suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 69. He had lived just long enough to see the world he helped create, where businesses of all kinds were adopting the punch card tabulators he pioneered. Though few knew his name, Hollerith‘s inventions had already reshaped the way organizations collected and used information.
Hollerith‘s legacy extended far beyond his own lifetime. The basic architecture of his tabulating systems – input with punch cards, processing with electromechanical relays, output to counters and summary cards – would reign for another 50 years until fully electronic computers began to displace them in the 1950s. Even as late as 1965, IBM was still producing 3 billion punch cards per year.
Many of the defining features of modern computing can be traced back to innovations that Hollerith and his successors pioneered:
- Removable storage media in the punch cards, which held both data and instructions
- Configurable processing units to carry out different operations with the same machine
- Peripheral equipment like keypunches and sorters to prepare data for input and organize the output
- Conditional processing, where different instructions could be executed based on the data
"The Hollerith machines were the beginning of the mechanization of information handling, a job that today is performed electronically by computers. Hollerith‘s methods were used for vital statistics, censuses, and governmental accounting and record-keeping of many kinds until well into the twentieth century."
-Columbia University Computing History
Perhaps most significant was how Hollerith‘s inventions empowered an entire industry devoted to information processing as a service. Hollerith‘s Tabulating Machine Company, which became part of IBM, was a pioneer in leasing equipment to customers and selling them the supplies needed to use it. This business model of providing data processing services would dominate the early computer industry and lay the foundations for today‘s software-as-a-service giants.
Hollerith‘s machines also helped kickstart the quantitative revolution in fields from public health to economics. With the ability to rapidly tabulate and cross-reference vital statistics, researchers could investigate questions like the connection between sanitation and mortality in ways never before possible. Hollerith‘s approach also influenced major tech innovators like IBM‘s Thomas J. Watson and Intel‘s Robert Noyce.
While not a household name like Edison or Ford, Herman Hollerith ranks among America‘s most influential inventors. His tabulating machines forever changed how organizations and individuals collect, store, and use information. In our data-driven age of smartphones and streaming video, we‘re all living in the world that Herman Hollerith helped create, punch card by punch card.
