Hollerith

Herman Hollerith


Born: 29 Feb 1860 in Buffalo, New York, USA
Died: 17 Nov 1929 in Washington D.C., USA

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Herman Hollerith was a graduate of Columbia University and joined the US Census Bureau as a statistician. He used a punched card device to help analyse the 1880 US census data.

In 1896 Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company to exploit his invention, the Company became part of IBM in 1924. The Hollerith system was used for the 1911 UK census.

References:

  1. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  2. A G Debus (ed.), Herman Hollerith, World's Who's Who in Science (1968).
  3. Herman Hollerith, Dictionary of American Biography.
  4. G D Austrian, Herman Hollerith : forgotten giant of information processing (New York, 1982).
  5. K S Reid-Green, The history of census tabulation, Scientific American 260 (1989), 78-83.
  6. A Class, Introducing the past master of punch cards, Computing (1990), 16-17.
  7. F W Kistermann, The invention and development of the Hollerith punched card : in commemoration of the 130th anniversary of the birth of Herman Hollerith and for the 100th anniversary of large scale data processing, Annals of the history of computing 13 (1991), 245-259.

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JOC/EFR December 1996