Herman Hollerith:

The World's First Statistical Engineer

Portrait of Hollerith

In 1790 it took the United States' Census Bureau less than nine months to complete the first census. By 1860 the population increased almost tenfold since 1790, from 3.8 million to 31.8 million.¹ In 1887 the Census Bureau completed the eleventh census seven years after it began. The inability to obtain census data in a reasonable time frame was a manifestation of what all data collectors had to face: With current technology the scale and complexity of some tabulations would soon be unthinkable

In the case of the census, a solution was necessary. These calculations were not solely for bureaucrats or intellectual curiosity. A regular census was needed to uphold the integrity of the United States Constitution. The seats in the House of Representatives are assigned based on the census data. Due to the dynamic state of the nation's population at the time of the eleventh census the need to stay abreast on the changing demography of the country was particularly urgent.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century great changes in the composition of the population of the United States occurred. The population increased by more than twelve million between 1880 and 1890.¹ Large numbers of foriegn born people immigrated to the US and a general increase in number of native born people occurred. Urbanization and the westward movement of people compounded the Census Bureau's dilemma. During this time of dramatic change in the nation's people, the primitive methods used to tabluate the census were not improved. As a result of the significant changes in the composition of the population and the time lapse between the collection and tabulation, the data of the eleventh census was outdated before the census was even completed.²

The Census Bureau's solution was to have a competition to find a new method by which the census could be tabulated. Herman Hollerith entered and won this competition. With his victory, not only did Hollerith make it possible to complete the census in a reasonable time frame, but his methods, which were used well into the 1960s, offered a foundation for the future collection of all types of data¹. With his invention Hollerith allowed for the creation of one of the most dominant corporations of the computer age and secured his place in history as the father of information processing.