Herman Hollerith

Timeline

1860, February 29: Hollerith born in Buffalo, NY

1875: transferred to the Columbia School of Mines

1879: graduated

1882: convinced problem of census could be solved by mechanical means; MIT offers him post as instructor in mechanical engineering

1884: first patent, covering "the invention of a machine that represented information by a double row of holes punched across the width of a roll of narrow paper" (Essinger 2004, 163)

1896, December 3: Hollerith organized his ventures into Tabulating Machine Company

1900: starts calling his automatic machines "tabulators"

1907: tabulator "fitted with ingenious elctromagnetic printing mechanisms so that the user would be presented with a printed document incorporating the totals from each operation" (Essinger 2004, 171)

1911, July 5: Charles Ranlegh Flint orgnizes a merger of the Computing Scale Company, International Time Recording Company, the Bundy Manufacturing Company, and Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, now all called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or C-T-R

1914, Decemeber 15: Hollerith resigns the board, Thomas Watson takes over

1924: Thomas Watson changes the company's name to International Business Machines Corporation Inc, or IBM

1930s: 400 series of punched-card machines, including 405 Electric Accounting Machine; by 1935 IBM dominated with 85% market share in US for tabulation machines (Essinger 2004, 189)