Herman Hollerith
- Counting the 1890 census (62 million people) in less than the 7 years
it took to do the 1880 census
- A competition was held and won by Hollerith.
- Applied the punch card technology invented by Jacquard
- Used punch cards the size of dollar bills
- Also used some of the technology as in the electric telegraph
- Could read 50-80 cards a minute
- Computed the census in 2 years
- Hollerith formed the Tabulating machine company that became IBM.
- Today, it still takes several years to compute the census.