Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith was a German-American engineer who invented an electromechanical tabulating machine that used punched cards to record and process data, work regarded as marking the beginning of mechanized data processing. He patented the design in 1884 after developing it in response to the United States Census Bureau's difficulty processing the 1880 census, which had taken eight years to tabulate by hand; his machine helped the 1890 census, despite counting a larger population, be completed in about six years. He founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 to manufacture and lease his equipment, which was adopted for census work by Britain, Germany, Russia, Canada, France and other countries. In 1911 his company merged with three others to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which was renamed International Business Machines Corporation, IBM, in 1924. He received the Franklin Institute's Elliott Cresson Medal in 1890 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990.