Presentation on theme: "Bryce Giddens. Born in Buffalo, New York on February 29, 1860. Parents were immigrants to the US from Germany in 1848. He was clever at an early."— Presentation transcript:
Born in Buffalo, New York on February 29, 1860. Parents were immigrants to the US from Germany in 1848. He was clever at an early age but hated his teacher correcting him.
Hollerith entered the City College of New York in 1875. Became an engineer graduate of the Columbia School of Mines in 1879. His exam scores were so high that his professor asked him if he would be his assistant.
Joined the U.S. census bureau as a statistician. His job involved solving problems of analyzing the large amounts of data generated by the 1880 census. Needed a way to make his job easier.
Herman Hollerith first got his idea for the punch-card tabulation machine from watching a train conductor punch tickets. Dr. Shaw Billings gave him an idea for the tabulating machine. -He said… “There ought to be some mechanical way of doing this job, something on the principle of the Jacquard loom, whereby holes in a card regulate the pattern to be woven. “
He used metal pegs to punch through holes onto an electrical plate. Each hole represented data. The machine used electricity to sort data.
Before Herman Hollerith built the tabulating machine, the census took 7 years, With the machine, the census took just 6 weeks.
Speed was not the only benefit of using Hollerith's system. He used it to gather more data like the number of children born in a family. Also used to count the number of people who spoke English were part of the 1890 census.
His invention became the foundation of a company that is now IBM (International Business Machines) In the 1880s, at the same time as he was developing his first punched card system, he invented a new brake system for trains.
Hollerith worked with the company he founded as a consulting engineer until his retirement in 1921. Hollerith retired to his farm in rural Maryland, where he spent the rest of his life raising cattle. Hollerith died of a heart attack in 1929, eight years after retiring.