This Week in History: Herman Hollerith’s world-changing invention
- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Herman Hollerith.
If you’re wondering who the heck the last man is, just know that he definitely deserves to be up there with the other great innovators of the technological revolution. In fact, he was the granddaddy of them all, preceding Jobs and Gates by a century.
Herman Hollerith was an unknown engineer when he applied for the patent on his world-changing invention on June 8, 1887. His invention was the product of his work with the Census Bureau early in his career.
After graduating with his engineering degree at 19 years old, he eventually got a job on the 1880 census team that was responsible for adding up the demographic information collected across the country. This was a laborious and error-prone process that took eight years to fully complete – just two years before it had to start all over again with the next census!
After working with the census for two years, Hollerith became a professor at MIT and later went on to develop electro-pneumatic and vacuum-operated breaks for railroad engines.
Finally, he turned back to the frustrating problem of data compilation and, on June 8, 1887 he filed a patent for “a novel sorting device,” that he had devised as part of an “apparatus for compiling statistics.” What Hollerith had invented was a tabulating machine that used punch cards to quickly sort and compile statistical information. It worked like this:
A census worker would take one person’s information and punch that person’s details onto the appropriate places on the card. Another employee would then place the card on a press attached to the tabulating machine and lock the cover into place. This action would push a panel of pins down onto the card.
The pins that made their way through the holes contacted small cups of mercury, which completed an electrical circuit. The electrical impulses this created were transmitted to the counters on the machine and the results were registered on the counter board.
Hollerith’s design won a competition the Census Bureau had organized to find a more efficient means of calculating their data. When it was utilized in the 1890 census, Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine completed the entire 8-year process in just two years and saved the government $5 million.
Taking his machine, Hollerith created a business – the Hollerith Tabulating Machine Co. By 1911, his machine had counted the populations of Austria, Canada, Denmark, England, Russia and many more. But his invention was utilized for more things than simply counting people.
It was beginning to look like Hollerith would hold a monopoly on this age-defining invention. Then, in a move that smacks of betrayal today, the Census Bureau – barely skirting patent restrictions – invented their own tabulating machine, one that was even more efficient in adding data than Hollerith’s.
When another census employee patented this knock-off and started his own company, it didn’t take long for Hollerith’s company to feel the loss in their sales. Thanks to the hiring of an able executive in 1918, however, the company rebounded and returned to the top once more.
In time, people found even more uses for the tabulating machine. Businesses soon realized that the information on the cards didn’t just have to stand for a person. The data could be about a product, an insurance customer or a freight car line.
Not only did his machine allow people to add up numbers at an astounding rate, but it also allowed them to understand information in new ways.
By rearranging the wires on the tabulating machine, the tabulator could sort through thousands – millions of cards.
It was with a Hollerith Tabulating Machine that England was able to break the Nazi Enigma machine ciphers during World War 2. So well designed and versatile was Hollerith’s machine that it remained the primary form of data processing from 1890 until the 1950s.
Even after it was eclipsed by what would eventually become the computer, Hollerith’s legacy lived on. Because his Tabulating Machine Company eventually merged with two other companies to form the corporation known today as the International Business Machines – IBM.
So, you can see now why Hollerith deserves a place of honor among the great tech innovators of our day. You might even say that his contribution to data processing was … incalculable.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.