At least once a week, I find out about some dude that did something cool way back when. Last week was that Walter Wellman guy, and today I found out about *drumroll* Herman Hollerith. (That's him, with the mustache.)
Hollerith was born on February 29 (A leap year!), 1860, in Buffalo, New York. He went to college at the age of 15, and graduated with a degree in Mining Engineering.
Right now, you're probably wondering, "what the crap, Tony? Why are you telling us about this guy?" Well, I'll tell you: he invented the punch card, and the machine that reads them.
WAIT! Don't leave yet! It gets better.
He invented that machine for the 1890 Census, which takes place every decade and counts everyone in the United States. From that data, we can determine how many congressmen your state gets, how many electoral votes your state gets, and what federal grants your state gets. We've had one every decade since the Revolutionary War ended, starting in 1790. By the time Hollerith rolled around, the US was so big, and there was so much information to be filled out for the census that it took the better part of 9 years to publish all the data... just in time for the next census to start.
So along comes Hollerith, with his mechanical tabulator (I love that old-timey talk), and guess what he does with it? He cut that time down, start to finish, to 2-and-a-half years. The population stuff was figured out in just SIX WEEKS, and all that other stuff (opinions about things like churches, poverty, crime, and then individual business info) took longer, but back then, six weeks was unheard of.
Do you see what I'm getting at? This guy was instrumental in creating electronic computational devices, the descendants of which you are reading this article on. COMPUTERS, ladies and gents, computers.
Later on in his life, he became one of the founding members of International Business Machines, better known as IBM. Also, he had an awesome mustache.
I like this stuff. I'm gonna try and do more like this, hopefully once a week. Random people from history are fun to me. I'll try to make it interesting, and not scare away the few readers I actually have.
Stay classy, Planet Earth.
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