Herman Hollerith

The 1890 U.S. Census was completed in roughly one year using Hollerith's punch card tabulating machines, compared to approximately eight years required to manually tabulate the 1880 census results. Hollerith's machines processed the data for over 62 million people by using electrical sensors to read holes punched in paper cards, dramatically reducing both time and labor costs.

Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 to commercialize his punch card technology after the success of the 1890 census. In 1911, financier Charles Flint merged the Tabulating Machine Company with three other businesses to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which was renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924 under Thomas Watson Sr.

Hollerith's system used paper cards punched with holes at specific positions representing data points such as age, sex, and nationality for each individual counted in the census. The cards were then placed over rows of mercury cups while spring-loaded pins pressed down—wherever a hole existed, the pin completed an electrical circuit through the mercury, incrementing a mechanical counter and sorting the card into the appropriate bin.

Yes, Hollerith's punch card system was adopted by governments and businesses worldwide, including railroads, insurance companies, and European national censuses, establishing punched paper cards as a primary data storage medium for decades. The concept of storing data as patterns of holes in physical cards directly influenced early digital computer input systems and persisted in commercial computing through the 1970s with IBM card readers.