Herman Hollerith
Herman Hollerith (* February 29, 1860 in Buffalo, New York, † November 17, 1929 in Washington, DC) was an American entrepreneur and engineer. He is the inventor of the eponymous Hollerith punch card method in data processing.
- 3.1 Tabulating Machine Company
- 3.2 Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation
- 3.3 IBM
Biography
Hollerith was born in Buffalo in the State of New York as a child of German immigrants from Großfischlingen ( in Neustadt an der Haardt ). He attended New York City College. The study of engineering at Columbia University he graduated in 1879 as a mining engineer from. After that he worked as a special agent with the U.S. in 1880 census, for which he created a statistical report on the nature and regional distribution of the energy sources of heavy industry. In 1882 he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1883 he moved to the U.S. Patent Office.
Punch cards Patents
In 1884, he was freelancing. In the same year he submitted his first invention for data storage, the No. 395.781 and 395.782 led after a few revisions to the punch-card patents of 1889. Here he drew on the design ideas of the French mechanic Falcon, who steered his loom by an Holzbrettchens with hole combinations and the development of this process by Jacquard, who replaced the wooden board by punch cards from cardboard templates. Hollerith transferred the control method by means of punched cards to organizational problems. A former trick the railway conductor gave him the idea of the hole card is used for mass data collection: You punched the tickets at certain points in order to preserve certain features of a passenger, such as gender and skin color. Thus multiple use of the ticket has been excluded by different people. He developed a system for collecting data on punch cards. This consisted in detail in the tabulating machine, the punch card sorter, the punch card punch and the punch card reader. On 9 December 1888 he installed the invention in the U.S. War Department. On 8 January 1889 he applied for his patent system.
Honors
- Several streets like in Baesweiler, Bremen, Erfurt, Eschweiler, Großfischlingen and Munich were named after him.
- The Herman Hollerith center at Reutlingen University bears his name.
Machinery
His system (also called Hollerith machine ) was used in the 1890 U.S. Census. It contributed to an enormous acceleration of the count. In just two years, with 43 machines and 500 employees as operator managed the analysis of the data, previously the same number of people would have taken all seven years. Hollerith did not sell his machines, he leased it to the Census Bureau. His first major assignment outside the United States came from Russia, where a census was carried out for the first time.
Company
Tabulating Machine Company
After further improvements to the system he founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 to use his invention commercially. However, because of excessive prices in 1905 he lost his best customer, the U.S. Census Bureau, which conducts censuses every ten years until today. He sued the Census Bureau in 1910 unsuccessfully for alleged patent infringement, trying to prevent the upcoming census. 1911 Hollerith eventually sold his company for approximately $ 1.21 million and a ten -year consultancy contract, which was worth 20,000 dollars annually.
Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation
Tabulating Machine Company merged with the Computing Scale Corporation, and the International Time Recording Company for Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation ( CTR).
IBM
1924 CTR was eventually renamed International Business Machines Corporation ( IBM).
Hollerith machines in Germany
- German licensee was from 1910 the German Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft DEHOMAG in Berlin.