Herman Hollerith: Father of Modern Automatic Computation

Herman Hollerith was an American statistician who invented the mechanical tabulator that can rapidly tabulate millions of data derived from punch cards. Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company which later merged with another company that eventually became IBM. His contribution to the field of statistics earned him the honor as the Father of Modern Automatic Computation.

Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York on February 29, 1860 to a German father. He earned his Engineer of Mines degree at Columbia University School of Mines in 1879. He also finished his Ph.D. in the same university. He was a professor in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he started experimenting with punch cards.

In his experiments, Hollerith developed a mechanism that used electrical connections as trigger for counting and recording information. The idea was to code all data numerically. Hollerith believed that when numbers are punched on specific locations with a card, then the information can be sorted and counted mechanically. Hollerith described the system in his doctoral thesis entitled “An Electrical Tabulating System.” Later, his invention was issued US Patent 395,782.