Herman Hollerith

He dated Kate Sherman Billings, daughter of Dr. John Shaw Billings for a brief period. He met Kate at the Census Bureau, where he used to work, after completing his graduation.

On September 15, 1890, he married Lucia Beverly Talcott. They were blessed with six children: Lucia, Nannie, Virginia, Herman, Richard, and Charles.

He died on 17 November 1929, in Washington, D.C., at the age of 69, due to heart failure.

He was born on February 29, 1860 in Buffalo, New York to German immigrants, Prof. George Hollerith and his wife, Franciska (Brunn) Hollerith.

He attended the City College of New York in 1875 for his early education and was later enrolled at the Columbia University School of Mines.

At the university, he took the standard course of study which required both classes and practical work. He also visited local industries, such as metallurgical and machine shops, in order to understand how they functioned.

As an engineering student, he studied chemistry, physics, and geometry, as well as courses in surveying and graphics. In 1879, he graduated with distinction from the university with an "Engineer of Mines" degree.

He later obtained his doctorate degree from the Columbia University, although some historians say it was an honorary degree.

In 1880, he got his first job at the U.S. Census Bureau as an assistant to his former teacher, William Petit Trowbridge. He met John S. Billings, director of the Census Bureau’s division of vital statistics, who first suggested the idea of developing a mechanical means to count the vast amount of raw data generated in their work.

His brief time at the Census Bureau and discussions with Billings, got him thinking that a machine like an automatic weaving device might be a replacement for hand counting. The machine could use punched cards for storing data and would reduce a considerable amount of time for processing the data.

In 1882, he became an instructor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). But after a while, he left it and went to St. Louis, Missouri, where he experimented with and designed an electrically activated brake system for railroads.

In 1884, he got a job with the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., where he remained until 1890.

Meanwhile, he developed a mechanism for recording information and coding data numerically. He discovered that, when punched in specific locations on a card, numbers could be used to record and sort data. He constructed his machines for the US Census Bureau, which used them to arrange data for the 1890 census.

He is best known for the invention of a mechanical tabulator using punched cards where data was stored to tabulate statistics. His designs for tabulating and sorting machines and the key punch became standard for the information processing/computing industry for almost a century.

He was the sole founder of the company, ‘Tabulating Machine Company’, which was later merged with others to form one of the most influential corporations of the computer age, IBM.