1890 AD |
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| It is often said that necessity is the mother of invention, and this was certainly true in the case of the American census. Following the population trends established by previous surveys, it was estimated that the census of 1890 would be required to handle data from more than 62 million Americans. | In addition to being prohibitively expensive, the existing system of making tally marks in small squares on rolls of paper and then adding the marks together by hand was extremely time consuming. In fact it was determined that, if the system remained unchanged, there was no chance of collating the data from the 1890 census into any useful form until well after the 1900 census had taken place, by which time the 1890 data would be of little value. | |
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| The solution to this problem was developed during the 1880s by an American inventor called Herman Hollerith, whose idea it was to use Jacquard's punched cards to represent the census data, and to then read and collate this data using an automatic machine. | ||
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| While he was a lecturer at MIT, Hollerith developed a simple
prototype which employed cards he punched using a tram conductor's ticket punch, where
each card was intended to contain the data associated with a particular individual. From this prototype, he evolved a mechanism that could read the presence or absence of holes in the cards by using spring-mounted nails that passed through the holes to make electrical connections. |
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| Hollerith's final system included an automatic electrical tabulating machine with a large number of clock-like counters that accumulated the results. By means of switches, operators could instruct the machine to examine each card for certain characteristics, such as profession, marital status, number of children, and so on. | ||
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| When a card was detected that met the specified criteria, an electrically controlled sorting mechanism could gather those cards into a separate container. Thus, for the first time it was possible to extract information such as the number of engineers living in a particular state who owned their own house and were married with two children. Although this may not tickle your fancy, having this capability was sufficient to drive the statisticians of the time into a frenzy of excitement and data collation. | In addition to solving the census problem, Hollerith's machines proved themselves to be extremely useful for a wide variety of statistical applications, and some of the techniques they used were to be significant in the development of the digital computer. In February 1924, Hollerith's company changed its name to International Business Machines, or IBM. (See also Hollerith's punched cards.) | |
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| These notes are abstracted from the book Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) Copyright Information |
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