Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards in order to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of the company that became IBM.
Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York and spent his early childhood there. He entered the City College of New York in 1875 and graduated from the Columbia University School...
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Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards in order to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of the company that became IBM.
Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York and spent his early childhood there. He entered the City College of New York in 1875 and graduated from the Columbia University School of Mines with an "Engineer of Mines" degree in 1879. In 1880, he listed himself as a mining engineer while living in Manhattan, and he completed his Ph.D. in 1890 at Columbia University.Herman Hollerith spent most of his life in Buffalo and did many inventions there.
At the urging of John Shaw Billings, Hollerith developed a mechanism to make electrical connections trigger a counter to record information. A key idea was that data could be coded numerically. Hollerith saw that if numbers could be punched in specified locations on a card, in...
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