Herman Hollerith

1880 census, counted by hand, and it was a disaster of slowness.

Herman Hollerith, 1860 to 1929, watched train conductors punch holes in different positions on tickets to record what a traveler looked like, positions of holes as a description.

He called it the punch photograph.

He tried paper tape first, then went to cards, and his first punches were round because he was using a conductor's punch.

It's the, at least I think of it as the classic, we start at the beginning of the universe type of problem.

You could say it goes all the way back to 1890 and Herman Hollerith's creation of the punch card tabulator.

Or you could say it goes back to the automatic sequence control calculator, aka the Harvard Mark I. I'm not gonna do that.

I think it's best to just say that by 1945, IBM had flirted with the idea of computers.

So Charles Babbage picks up the idea around these cards for his analytical machine.

When Herman Hollerith comes along later and wants to patent punch cards as a way of storing data, Babbage's precedent blocks him from owning the idea itself.

What he could own was the machinery in the system, which in the end was a more valuable thing anyways.

Hollerith's own account is that he got the idea partly from Dr. John Shaw Billings and partly from railway conductors punching holes in tickets to record what a passenger looked like.

And what puts him in business is a constitutional problem.

The United States has to count everybody every 10 years,

We can make this work." [laughs] Anyway, Bismarck, fascinating person and life.

Okay, on this day in 1884, American Herman Hollerith patents his mechanical tabulating machine, beginning the era of data processing.

Must say, I don't know much about that.

That's a small, uh, obscure bit of, of history, isn't it? Never heard of Herman Hollerith or his mechanical tabulating machine.

There you go.

All right, on this day, the Little Rock crisis.

And so much so that the 1880 census ended up taking almost a decade to tabulate.

And one of the things that's sort of interesting is the technology that the census acquired in 1880 to do this ended up being from a man named Hollerith, who would go on to found IBM.

But by 1902, they make this permanent.

So it's sitting in the executive branch like many things, but really still controlled in different ways by Congress, especially what happens to that data at the end.

Tula, 111,048.

Kishinev, 108,506 Nizhny Novgorod 98,503 AWG The surprisingly early availability of the Russian census returns is due to the employment of the Hollerith tabulating machine, first used for census purposes by the United States government in 1890.

Out of 2,403,750 Germans who left their native land between 1871 and 1896, about 96% emigrated to the United States.

Failing to divert the tide of emigration toward the German colonies in Africa, the government is now seeking to direct it toward certain parts of South America, in preference to the United States, where the peculiarities, language and customs of the Germans are lost by assimilation and emigrants become competitors with the artisans and agriculturists of the mother country.