Zac Ioannidis
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Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine

October 28, 2012

The electrical tabulating machine created by Herman Hollerith is considered by many to be among 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 state’s 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 was inspired 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 το 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 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. Then, one of the forty dials (capable of counting up to 9,999 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.

Another remarkable feat of the Hollerith Machine was its ability to not only count the population but also the correlation of the data 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 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). 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 Hollerith’s. 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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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I'm a Computer Science student at the University of Bristol. Can't think of something smart and witty about me to write right now so I'll just leave this as is for the time being. Twitter || Github.