Fortunately a man by the name of Herman Hollerith, who at the time taught mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was able to come up with a solution. Hollerith was familiar with the Jacquard loom, built in the early nineteenth century, which was programmable through the use of punch cards. He realized that the purely mechanical task of tabulating various statistics could be done by the use of similar technology.

In 1884 Herman Hollerith left his teaching job at MIT to obtain a post in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. Over the next couple years he developed an electrical tabulating machine which worked by having a card with holes punched in numerous spots indicating statistical information such as age, gender, marital status and so on. Next, the card would be placed in a machine which was comprised of spring-mounted pins that would complete an electrical circuit when a hole came up, similarly there would be an open circuit wherever a hole was not punched. The electrical current activated a mechanical counter, which in turn tabulated all the data in a very efficient manner.