The History of Terrorism
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Herman Hollerith
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Herman Hollerith
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1790-Today United States Census
1880 United States Census
Columbia School of Mines
Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
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US Brevet Brig Gen Francis Amasa Walker
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"The trouble was that if, for example, you wanted any statistics regarding Chinamen, you would have to run miles of paper to count a few Chinamen," Hollerith later explained in a letter.
1879 When Hollerith graduated from the Columbia School of Mines with a degree in engineering, he was immediately recruited to help compile economic statistics for the 1880 census, which was being run by Walker.
1882? After the 1880 census was complete, he quit his job for a teaching position at MIT -following Walker, who had recently been appointed president.
1890 In March 1890, Hollerith's machines were installed at the Inter-Ocean Building on Ninth Street in Washington, D.C., not far from the White House.
1897? A few years earlier, Russian Czar Nicholas II issued an imperial decree ordering his ministers to carry out the Russian Empire's first countrywide census.
1897? The people in charge of the census knew the only way to finish the job in a reasonable amount of time would be to use the most advanced technology on the market. And that's where the 36-year-old Hollerith came in.
1910-1949 Dehomag (IBM)
1911-1924 Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR)
2018 OneZero - The Racist Origins of America's Tech Industry
Hollerith kept tinkering with his invention, and before long, he came up with a design that separated the enumeration process into parts.
Tabulating Machine Company
That the census simultaneously played a central role in the development of the computer age more than 130 years ago makes it doubly relevant, offering a glimpse into how computers, surveillance, and racist government policies have been linked from...
The census needed to improve drastically. What it needed was a talented inventor, someone young and ambitious who would be able to come up with a method to automate tabulation and data analysis. Someone like Herman Hollerith.
The dark and ugly history of the census makes it a uniquely telling weathervane of race politics in America.
The Hollerith Electric Tabulating System
Willy Heidinger, an acquaintance of Hollerith, licensed all of Hollerith's The Tabulating Machine Company patents in 1910, and created Dehomag in Germany.