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Herman Holleriths Tabulating Machine and its impact in theHistory of Computing

The electrical tabulating machine created by Herman Hollerith is considered by many to beamong the earliest computers and envisages the premier form of automatic data processing.

Although used in smaller scale in the mid 1880s in hospitals and the army, its use in the 1890 US

Census revolutionized the way large data was handled, accessed and filtered.

The 1890 Census was a very important one for the United States, since the Seats in the

House of Representatives were to be apportioned, and this procedure relied heavily on the census

information, as every states representatives were determined based on its population. The Census

Bureau faced a difficult challenge since the previous tallying system was deemed inefficient and non-

scalable for the boom in population during the previous decade, due to border expansion and

immigration.

Meanwhile, Herman Hollerith, an engineering graduate from Columbia University, started

developing a prototype machine to handle the sorting of large amounts of data. Hollerith wasinspired by the punch cards in the Jacquard loom as well as the punch photographs utilized by

train conductors to provide a brief description of the passengers physical attributes.

The Electrical Tabulating Machine as it was called, proved to be particularly efficient and

was declared be the method used in the next head count. The system consisted of three

components, a pantograph punch, a tabulator and a sorter. Information was punched on the card,

in one of the available positions and was then placed on a sensory mechanism connected to the

tabulator which had steel spring-loaded pins[0] for each position on the punch card. Where there

were holes, the pins would connect with a bed of mercury and affect an electrical contact[1]. Then,

one of the forty dials (capable of counting up to 9,999[2]) on the tabulator matching a specific field

on the punch card would increase and the lid of a box would pop open to allow the storage of the

cards. The beauty of this system was that the punch cards were essentially binary systems,

representing crude binary trees, with the absence or not of holes equating to logical zero or ones

respectively. This proved to be advantageous when transferring the data into digital computers[3].

Another remarkable feat of the Hollerith Machine was its ability to not only count the

population but also the correlation of the data[4] contained among the 40 distinct fields in the punch

cards. This proved to be a huge step forwards for statistics and looking back we can pinpoint

Hollerith as the forerunner of large scale data processing. His machine also started the trend of

computers being used outside of experimental, scientific environments in widespread, practical,

real-world problems. In fact, the Electrical Tabulator was licensed and used for censi in Austria,

Canada, Russia[5] and variations of it were utilized in freight shipments, commercial bookkeeping

and industrial accounting. Few people disrupted the course of technology the way Herman Hollerith and his tabulator

did. As well as undertaking the seemingly impossible task that was the 1890 US Census and

delivering results much sooner than expected, he also saved the government the equivalent of $1

billion (in 1990 dollars)[6,7]. Furthermore, his paradigm showed the rest of the world that using

technology for large projects was much more cost-efficient and came with tangible benefits. This of

course led to the founding of technical, solution engineering companies, aimed towards both the

private and public sectors. One such company was IBM, created from a merge between three

others, with one being Holleriths. It is truly amazing to think that the whole technological

ecosystem of today and the way with which we perceive computers and technology could have been

instigated from a single machine.

Zac Ioannidis

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[0]: http://www.i-programmer.info/history/8-people/440-herman-hollerith.html?start=1

[1]: http://www.thocp.net/hardware/tabulating_machine.htm#9

[2]: The Electrical Tabulating Machine, Herman Hollerith, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society,

Vol. 57, No. 4 (Dec., 1894), pp. 678-689

[3]: http://wvegter.hivemind.net/abacus/CyberHeroes/Hollerith.htm

[4]: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/hh/index.html[5]: http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/tabulate/tabulate.php?cts=electricity-computing

[6]: U.S. Census Bureau, 100 Years of Data Processing: The Punchcard Century (Washington,

D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1991), 5-6.

[7]: The Creation and Destruction of the 1890 Federal Census, Robert L. Dorman, The American

Archivist, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Fall-Winter, 2008), pp. 350-383

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Hollerith Statistical Technique, Irving V. Sollins, Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 6, No.

1 (Sep., 1932), pp 43-51

http://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/the_hollerith_tabulator.html

http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/ 1996/spring/1890-census-1.html

Holleriths Electric Tabulating Machine, The Railroad Gazette, April 19, 1805

http://www.memory.loc.gov

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith

http://mntl.illinois.edu/docs/holonyak.pdf

http://blog.id.com.au/2012/australian-census-2011/the-census-drove-the-creation-of-the-

modern-computer/

http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/tabulate/tabulate.php?cts=electricity-computing

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hollerith.html

Zac Ioannidis

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hollerith.htmlhttp://blog.id.com.au/2012/australian-census-2011/the-census-drove-the-creation-of-the-modern-computer/http://blog.id.com.au/2012/australian-census-2011/the-census-drove-the-creation-of-the-modern-computer/http://blog.id.com.au/2012/australian-census-2011/the-census-drove-the-creation-of-the-modern-computer/http://mntl.illinois.edu/docs/holonyak.pdfhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerithhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionmenthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machinehttp://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mcc&fileName=023/page.db&recNum=2&itemLink=r%3Fammem%2Fmcc%3A%40field%28DOCID%2B%40lit%28mcc%2F023%29%29http://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/the_hollerith_tabulator.htmlhttp://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hollerith.htmlhttp://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hollerith.htmlhttp://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/tabulate/tabulate.php?cts=electricity-computinghttp://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/tabulate/tabulate.php?cts=electricity-computinghttp://blog.id.com.au/2012/australian-census-2011/the-census-drove-the-creation-of-the-modern-computer/http://blog.id.com.au/2012/australian-census-2011/the-census-drove-the-creation-of-the-modern-computer/http://blog.id.com.au/2012/australian-census-2011/the-census-drove-the-creation-of-the-modern-computer/http://blog.id.com.au/2012/australian-census-2011/the-census-drove-the-creation-of-the-modern-computer/http://mntl.illinois.edu/docs/holonyak.pdfhttp://mntl.illinois.edu/docs/holonyak.pdfhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerithhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerithhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionmenthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionmenthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machinehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machinehttp://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mcc&fileName=023/page.db&recNum=2&itemLink=r%3Fammem%2Fmcc%3A%40field%28DOCID%2B%40lit%28mcc%2F023%29%29http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mcc&fileName=023/page.db&recNum=2&itemLink=r%3Fammem%2Fmcc%3A%40field%28DOCID%2B%40lit%28mcc%2F023%29%29http://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/the_hollerith_tabulator.htmlhttp://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/the_hollerith_tabulator.htmlhttp://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/tabulate/tabulate.php?cts=electricity-computinghttp://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/tabulate/tabulate.php?cts=electricity-computinghttp://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/hh/index.htmlhttp://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/hh/index.htmlhttp://wvegter.hivemind.net/abacus/CyberHeroes/Hollerith.htmhttp://wvegter.hivemind.net/abacus/CyberHeroes/Hollerith.htmhttp://www.thocp.net/hardware/tabulating_machine.htm#9http://www.thocp.net/hardware/tabulating_machine.htm#9http://www.i-programmer.info/history/8-people/440-herman-hollerith.html?start=1http://www.i-programmer.info/history/8-people/440-herman-hollerith.html?start=1