The first job German-American statistician Herman Hollerith (1869-1929) had was with the U.S. Census Bureau. His task was to collate information gained from the 1880 census by hand and he quickly realized that the process would be much faster and less prone to error if it was automated.
Trying to work out a solution to the problem, he arrived at the idea for a system based on punchcards while observing a bus conductor punch holes in tickets. He filed his first patent in 1884.
The punchcards were not entirely novel—the French weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard had invented a way of controlling the warp and weft on his loom by patterns of holes in cards—but Hollerith's design for a tabulator and sorter were original.
The information was read from each card using an array of spring-mounted brass pins that formed an electrical connection through any holes in the card. The tabulator then had many output dials that could display the information contained on each card. In addition to reading information, the sorter part of the machine enabled the operator to select for certain characteristics such as sex, marital status, or profession using an array of switches. Cards that matched the specified criteria would be automatically gathered in a special container, allowing statisticians to gather data to their hearts' content for the first time.
Hollerith's machine was used in the 1890 census and reduced the time spent collating the data by over half, saving the country $5 million. Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 to market his invention, which in 1924 changed its name to International Business Machines (IBM). His system was used In computers until the late 1970s.
