Herman Hollerith, the son of immigrants, struggled early on at school and then later in bookkeeping at college but it didn’t stop him inventing machines that used punch cards to store data. He founded a company to make and sell his machines. It turned into the company now called IBM, which of course helped propel us into the computer age.
Hollerith had worked as a census clerk for a while, and the experience led to his innovation. The United States has been running a national census every 10 years since the American Revolution, aiming to record the details of every person, for tax and national planning purposes. It is not just a count but has recorded information about each person such as male/female, married or not, ethnicity, whether they can read, disabilities, and so on.
As the population expanded it of course became harder to do. It was also made harder as more data about each person was being collected over time. For the 1890 census a competition was held to try and find better ways to compile the data collected. Herman Holerith won it with his punch card based machine. It could process data up to twice as fast as his competitors and with his system data could be prepared 10 times faster.
To use the machine, the census information for each person was recorded by punching holes in special cards at specific positions. It was a binary system with a hole essentially meaning the specific feature was present (eg they were married) and no hole meaning it wasn’t (eg they were single). Holes against numbers could also mean one of several options.
The machine could read the holes because they allowed a wire to make an electrical connection to a pool of mercury below so the holes just acted as switches. Data could therefore be counted automatically, with each hole adding one to a different counter. It was the first time that a system of machine-readable data had been used and of course binary went on to be the way all computers store information. In processing the census his machines counted the data on around 100 million cards (an early example of Big Data processing!). This contributed to reducing the time it took to compile the data from the whole country by two years. It also saved about $5 million
Holerith patented the machine and was also awarded a PhD for his work on it. He set up a company to sell it called the Tabulating Machine Company. Over time it merged with other companies until eventually in 1924 the resulting company changed its name to International Business Machines or is it is now known, IBM. it is of course one of the most important companies driving the computer age, building early mainframe computers the size of rooms that revolutionised business computing, but later also responsible for the personal computer, leading to the idea that everyone could own a computer.
Not a bad entrepreneurship legacy for someone who early on at school apparently struggled with, and certainly hated, spelling – he jumped out of a window at school to avoid doing it. He also did badly at bookkeeping in college. He was undeterred by what he was poor at though and focussed on what he was good at, He was hard working and developed his idea for a mechanical tabulating machine for 8 years before his first machine went to work. Patience and determination was certainly a strength that paid off for him!
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