Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith

Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century.Hollerith founded a company that was amalgamated in 1911 with several other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. In 1924, the company was renamed "International Business Machines" (IBM) and became one of the largest and most successful companies of the 20th century. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Herman Hollerith has received more than 672,501 page views. His biography is available in 53 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 52 in 2019). Herman Hollerith is the 38th most popular inventor (up from 40th in 2019), the 317th most popular biography from United States (up from 352nd in 2019) and the 9th most popular American Inventor.

Herman Hollerith is most famous for inventing the punch card tabulator.