Herman Hollerith and IBM

Born in 1860 to German immigrants, Herman Hollerith attended The City College of New York and Columbia University. With an engineering degree, he went on to become a teacher, a statistician, a businessman, and inventor. And, later awarded a PhD from Columbia.

One of his early jobs was working for the US census. After watching first-hand how the census recording system didn’t work, he began work developing a means to tabulate data more efficiently. Eventually settling on a system of punchcards, he also created the machines that read those cards. Dr. Hollerith’s method of processing data thru a punchcard system helped users process large amounts of data faster and more efficiently than ever before. 

One of the first uses of his punchcard system was for the 1890 US census, where the time to calculate data was drastically reduced using his system. European countries eventually adopted the Hollerith punchcard system and his company became an international success.

His patents in the electromechanical data processing field and other areas helped create the company that we know today as IBM, and made Dr. Hollerith a wealthy man. His punchcard system, thru IBM, was the basis of data collection into the 1970s and became the foundation of the Fortran computing language.  

Brighton was Dr. Hollerith’s nearly 300 acre getaway from the summer heat at his Washington DC residence. And, the place that allowed him to pursue his other interests such as cattle breeding, farming and boating. He was married to Lucia Talcott Hollerith and they had six children. Dr. Hollerith died in 1929.