|
1884
Herman Hollerith receives a patent for his automatic
punch card tabulator
The census of 1890 created a new problem for the government.
If it was done by traditional methods, the census would take years of work
and incredible expense due to the fact that the population of the United
States had reached 62 million people. It was predicted that the data
would still be being tabulated by the time of the 1900 census. Herman
Hollerith, an American inventor, developed a solution. He decided
to develop a system of punch cards that could be tabulated and sorted by
an automatic machine. The machine detected the presence of
a whole by using a spring and a nail that would pass through holes and
a connect an electrical current. The machine could count the number
of people with very specific statistics, such as all single women with
two children in Oklahoma.
The machine turned out to be useful in all sorts of industries,
and Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Co., which changed its name
to International Business Machines in 1924.
Next : 1926 - Dr. Julius Lilienfield
filed for a patent on a transistor being used as an amplifier
|
