The Father Of Automatic Computation Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith (1860-1929)

Herman Hollerith is widely regarded as the father of modern automatic computation. He choose the punched card as the basis for storing and processing information and he built the first punched-card tabulating and sorting machines as well as the first key punch, and he founded the company that was to become IBM. Hollerith's designs dominated the computing landscape for almost 100 years.

The idea of this was born from the conductor who was punching the ticket in train which contain the information about the travel in ticket both the up and down station and male or female and other categories so from that his ideas were born.

After receiving his Engineer of Mines degree at age 19, Hollerith worked on the 1880 US census, a laborious and error-prone operation that cried out for mechanization.

After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on punched cards (pioneered in the to record information, and designed special equipment  a tabulator and sorter  to tally the results. His designs won the competition for the 1890 US census, chosen for their ability to count combined facts.

Herman Hollerith Tablulation Machine

 These machines reduced a ten-year job to three months saved the 1890 taxpayers five million dollars, and earned him an 1890 Columbia PhD.This was the first wholly successful information processing system to replace pen and paper. Hollerith's machines were also used for censuses in Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, and again in the US census of 1900. In 1911 Hollerith's company merged with several others to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924.

Between the 1880 and 1890 censuses, Hollerith spent a year (1882) on the Mechanical Engineering faculty at MIT, and then in the mid-1880s worked on railroad braking systems, obtaining several patents for both electromagnetic pneumatic brakes and vacuum operated brakes, as well as for corrugated metal tubing.His inventions were the foundation of the modern information processing industry.