Today on #ThisDayInBeardHistory Herman Hollerith, American statistician and inventor, died in 1929. The son of a German professor, he had earned his Ph.D. in engineering from Columbia University in the City of New York by the age of 20 and immediately began teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he taught mechanical engineering while conducting his first experiments with punched cards. Once perfected, he left teaching and joined the United States Census Bureau. He was granted a patent for his punch card system of compiling statistics and was awarded a contract by the Census Office to build his machines to tabulate the 1890 census. The census was completed in one year, as compared with the 8 years it took the 1880 census to be completed manually. This led to the creation of his Tabulating Machine Company and the leasing of his equipment and the purchasing of his cards by many major insurance companies and major census bureaus around the world. His success led him to merge his corporation with 3 others, and they became the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, before renaming themselves to International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM. With the invention of his punched card evaluating machine, this concept dominated the computing landscape for nearly a century and ushered in the beginning of the era of automatic data processing systems. So go forth and grow a moustache as fine as Mr. Holleriths and you too may change the landscape of technology for the next century to come, for it is #MoustacheMonday! - Anthony
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 18:17:50 +0000