Overview

By successfully automating the calculation of the 1890 United States census with an electro-mechanical punch-card device, inventor Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) laid the foundation for the next century's explosion of information-processing machines, technologies, systems, and businesses, including IBM, the world's largest computer corporation. Hollerith's use of standardized punched cards to represent information, and his addition of electricity to mechanical tabulation, greatly increased the effectiveness and range of applications of tabulating and, later, computing machines.

Background

The explosive growth of industry and population throughout the nineteenth century was matched and in some ways exceeded by growth in the amount of information those industries and people generated. There was an important and expanding need to manage and manipulate the statistics derived from that information, both for social...