INVENTIONS

mechanical tabulator

Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was an American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the creator of one of the companies that later combined and became IBM.

Herman Hollerith

Hollerith developed a mechanism using electrical connections to trigger a counter, recording information. A key idea was that data could be coded numerically. Hollerith determined that if numbers could be punched in particular locations on a card, in the now-familiar rows and columns, then the cards could be counted or sorted mechanically and the data recorded. A explanation of this system, An Electric Tabulating System in 1889, was submitted by Hollerith to Columbia University as his doctoral thesis, and is reprinted in Randell's book.

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