Herman Hollerith (* 29 February 1860 in Buffalo, New York; "† 17 November 1929 in Washington, D.C.) was an US-American entrepreneur, Ingenieur.Er is inventor of the Hollerith Lochkartenverfahrens designated after him in the data processing.

In Buffalo in US Federal State New York as a child of German immigrants from the Pfalz born studied it to the Columbia University engineering sciences. Hollerith was a graduated mine engineer and patents for an automatic railway compressed air brake and for the machine production of corrugated sheet plates had announced.

Since he worked first as a statistician for the American government, he concerned himself with the collection and storage of data by means of punch cards. Falling back to the construction ideas of the French mechanic Falcon, that its loom by means of a Holzbrettchens with punch combinations and the advancement of this procedure by Jacquard, which replaces the Holzbrettchen by punch cards from sticking templates, transferred Hollerith the control procedure steered by means of punched maps to organizational problem definitions. As model it used at the time at that time a system common within the railway range, which classified the passengers by means of several holes in the tickets according to sex and age. It developed a system for the collection of data on punch cards. On 9 December 1888 he installed the invention in the US war Ministry. On 8 January 1889 it announced its system to the patent. It became thereby the founder of the machine data processing.

Its system was used during the census 1890/1891. It contributed to an enormous acceleration of the counting, whereby it succeeded to evaluate these in only 4 weeks with 43 machines and 500 people as operating personnel for which the same number of people had before used whole 7 years. It was of central importance also that does not sell the machines, but was only rented. Holleriths first larger order outside of the United States came from Russia, where a census was accomplished for the first time.

After further improvements of the system it finally created 1896 the Tabulating Machine company, in order to use its invention commercially. However it lost 1905 due to covered prices its best customer, the American Census office, which accomplished every ten years censuses. He sued 1910 unsuccessfully the Census office because of alleged infringement of a patent and tried so the census to prevent. 1911 sold to Hollerith finally its society for approximately 1.21 million dollar plus over ten years a running advisor contract, which was dollar annually endowed with 20,000. Tabulating Machine company fused with the Computing Scale corporation and that internationally Time Recording company to the Computing Tabulating Recording corporation (CTR). 1924 were finally renamed CTR in internationally Business Machines corporation (IBM).

Literature

• Austrian, Geoffrey D. Herman Hollerith. Forgotten Giant OF information processing. New York: Columbia University press, 1982.
• Dotzler, Bernhard J. the adjustableness of the world. Herman Hollerith and the archaeology of the media. In: ders. /Stefan Andriopoulos (Hg.). 1929. Contributions for the archaeology of the media. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 2002, P. 288-315.
• Petzold, Hartmut. Modern computing artists. The industrialization of the computing technology in Germany. Munich: Beck, 1992.

Related links

• http://privat.swol.de/SvenBandel/Hollerith.htm
• http://www.hnf.de/museum/hollerith.html
• http://stefan-winterstein.de/papers/hollerith-ibm/

Articles in category "Herman Hollerith"

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