Tabulating Machine
The art of compiling statistics
Today in 1884, Herman Hollerith filed an application for a patent for a punched card tabulating machine titled “Art of Compiling Statistics.” The patent will be granted on January 8, 1889 and the tabulating machine will be used to speed up the processing of the 1890 U.S. Census.
James Cortada in Before the Computer quotes Walter Wilcox of the U.S. Bureau of the Census:
While the returns of the Tenth (1880) Census were being tabulated at Washington, John Shaw Billings [Director of the Division of Vital Statistics] was walking with a companion through the office in which hundreds of clerks were engaged in laboriously transferring data from schedules to record sheets by the slow and heartbreaking method of hand tallying. As they were watching the clerks he said to his companion, “there ought to be some mechanical way of doing this job, something on the principle of the Jacquard loom.”
Cortada continues:
It was a singular moment in the history of data processing, one historians could reasonably point to and say that things had changed because of it. It stirred Hollerith’s imagination and ultimately his achievements….
The U.S. Census of 1890… was a milestone in the history of modern data processing…. No other occurrence so clearly symbolized the start of the age of mechanized data handling…. Before the end of that year, [Hollerith’s] machines had tabulated all 62,622,250 souls in the United States. Use of his machines saved the bureau $5 million over manual methods while cutting sharply the time to do the job. Additional analysis of other variables with his machines meant that the Census of 1890 could be completed within two years, as opposed to nearly ten years taken for fewer data variables and a smaller population in the previous census.
Kevin Maney in Making the World Work Better:
Hollerith gave computers a way to sense the world through a crude form of touch. Subsequent computing and tabulating machines would improve on the process, packing more information unto cards and developing methods for reading the cards much faster. Yet, amazingly, for six more decades computers would experience the outside world no other way.