Herman Hollerith was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting.
18 Facts About Herman Hollerith
2.
Herman Hollerith is regarded as one of the seminal figures in the development of data processing.
3.
Herman Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860, where he spent his early childhood.
4.
Herman Hollerith entered the City College of New York in 1875, graduated from the Columbia School of Mines with an Engineer of Mines degree in 1879 at age 19, and, in 1890, earned a Doctor of Philosophy based on his development of the tabulating system.
5.
In 1882, Herman Hollerith joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he taught mechanical engineering and conducted his first experiments with punched cards.
6.
Herman Hollerith died in Washington, DC, at age 69 of a heart attack.
7.
At the suggestion of John Shaw Billings, Herman Hollerith developed a mechanism using electrical connections to increment a counter, recording information.
8.
Herman Hollerith determined that data in specified locations on a card, arranged in rows and columns, could be counted or sorted electromechanically.
9.
On January 8,1889, Herman Hollerith was issued US Patent 395,782, claim 2 of which reads:.
10.
Herman Hollerith had left teaching and began working for the United States Census Bureau in the year he filed his first patent application.
11.
Herman Hollerith initially did business under his own name, as The Herman Hollerith Electric Tabulating System, specializing in punched card data processing equipment.
12.
Herman Hollerith provided tabulators and other machines under contract for the Census Office, which used them for the 1890 census.
13.
In 1896, Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company.
14.
Herman Hollerith invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism and the first keypunch.
15.
In 1911, four corporations, including Herman Hollerith's firm, were amalgamated to form a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.
16.
Herman Hollerith is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC.
17.
Hollerith cards were named after Herman Hollerith, as were Hollerith strings and Hollerith constants.
18.
Rev Herman Hollerith IV, was the Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Southern Virginia, and another great-grandson, Randolph Marshall Hollerith, is an Episcopal priest and the dean of Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC.