Today in History: 1884 - Herman Hollerith patents his punched card calculator
During a short stint compiling manufacturing statistics for the US Census Office, Herman Hollerith grew frustrated with the organization’s manual process of counting questionnaires. The tedious, error-prone labor was creating an operational nightmare for an overtaxed agency. Certain that automation was the answer, he invented an electric-powered counting machine. It introduced the world to mechanized data processing and laid a foundation for the development of computers and the binary system of zeros and ones still used in information processing today.
Hollerith’s punched card tabulator, developed in the 1880s, eased the administrative burden of hand-counting the population in a country whose numbers were exploding. Its success in the 1890 census led countries around the world, including Austria, Canada, Cuba, France, Norway, the Philippines and Russia, to procure Hollerith’s tabulator for their own national counts.
Hollerith also licensed the machine to private businesses for statistical and accounting purposes, including for railroads, department stores and public utilities. Over the next 60-plus years, variations of the tabulator and its punched-card methods would itemize, categorize and compile data on all kinds of products and people across society. While spitting out numbers, these machines generated exorbitant profits over decades for the company that would become known as IBM.
A mining engineer from Buffalo, New York, Hollerith didn’t set out to be an inventor. But the challenge of stripping banal labor from the census process appealed to him. After a colleague at the Census Office proposed the idea of automating calculations in 1879, he got to work designing the new apparatus.
Hollerith applied for his first patent in 1884, outlining a proposed method to store data using holes punched into strips of paper, similar to how player pianos read thick rolls of paper full of notched notes. By 1886, he switched to punched cards, and a year later he applied for a second patent. The patents were granted in 1889.
Punched cards weren’t Hollerith’s idea. About 80 years prior, Joseph Marie Jacquard of France devised a way to use punched cards to automate steam-powered weaving looms. In the mid-1830s, English mathematician Charles Babbage developed plans for a computing engine — later dubbed the Analytical Engine — that could do math using instructions from punched cards. But Hollerith was the first to apply the principle to data processing.
In 1886, Hollerith began testing his machine by compiling mortality statistics for Baltimore, Jersey City and New York City. In 1888, the Census Office held a competition to find the fastest tabulating solution. The winner would earn a contract to process the 1890 census. His two competitors clocked in at 144.5 and 100.5 hours to capture the data used for the challenge. Hollerith came in at 72.5 hours. Hollerith’s machine also excelled at the task of preparing the data for tabulation, logging a time of 5.5 hours, which dramatically outperformed his competitors’ times of 44.5 and 55.5 hours.
Read more here: The punched card tabulator | IBM
Also on this day:
871 Battle of Ashdown: Ethelred I of Wessex and his brother Alfred the Great beat invading Danish army
1297 Monaco gains its independence.
1310 The Great Frost: in London the Thames river froze so thickly bonfires were lit on it
1610 German astronomer Simon Marius independently discovers the first three moons of Jupiter one day after Galileo
1902 New York state assemblyman Francis G. Landon gets a bill passed to criminalize men turning around on a street and “looking at a woman in that way”
1912 The African National Congress (ANC) is founded
1918 Mississippi becomes 1st state to ratify the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, authorizing the prohibition of alcohol
1968 Jacques Cousteau’s first undersea special airs on US network TV
1994 Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov begins his record spaceflight (437 days and 18 hours)
2014 First known interstellar meteor to ever hit Earth - CNEOS 2014-01-08 crash lands in Papua New Guinea
2016 ISO/Columbia Records/Sony Music release David Bowie’s 26th and final studio album “Blackstar” on his 69th birthday; enters charts in US and UK at #1
2024 Vulcan, NASA’s first commercially financed moon mission launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida but its lander Peregrine develops problems soon after
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1941 Graham Chapman - English comedian (Monty Python’s Flying Circus), born in Leicester, England (d. 1989)
1937 Dame Shirley Bassey - Welsh singer (Goldfinger; Diamonds Are Forever; Moonraker), born in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, Wales
1935 Elvis Aaron Presley - American King of Rock and Roll (“Hound Dog”; “Love Me Tender”; “Heartbreak Hotel”; “Suspicious Minds”), and actor (Jailhouse Rock; King Creole), born in Tupelo, Mississippi (d. 1977)
1908 William Hartnell - English actor (first Doctor in Doctor Who, Jackpot), born in London (d. 1975)
1868 Frank Watson Dyson - English astronomer, proved Einstein right about light bent by gravity, born in Measham, England (d. 1939)
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2020 Buck Henry [Henry Zuckerman] - American Emmy Award-winning screenwriter (Get Smart; The Graduate; The Owl and the Pussycat), actor (1st 10-time host of SNL; The Man Who Fell To Earth), and director Heaven Can Wait), dies of a heart attack at 89
2017 Peter Sarstedt - British pop-folk singer-songwriter and guitarist (“Where Do You Go To (My Lovely?”; “I Am A Cathedral”), dies at 75
1941 Lord Robert Baden-Powell - British officer and founder of the modern scouting movement, dies at 83
1642 Galileo Galilei - Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer who has been called the father of science, dies at 77
1324 Marco Polo - Venetian explorer (The Travels of Marco Polo), dies at 69
Holidays on this day
Argyle Day
Bubble Bath Day
Earth’s Rotation Day
International Typing Day
Midwife’s Day or Women’s Day - (In Greece)
National English Toffee Day
National Joygerm Day
National Man Watcher’s Day - (Also known as Male Watcher’s Day)
National Snuggle a Chicken Day (Every Second Wednesday in January)
National Winter Skin Relief Day
Show and Tell Day at Work
Take the Stairs Day (Every Second Wednesday in January)
War on Poverty Day
World Literary Day
World Typing Day
The Funnies:
Interesting (not necessarily extinct) animal of the day:
The Galapagos Islands are home to some of the strangest and most unique creatures on earth. For what appears to simply be an unassuming little bird, there’s a lot of competition to stand out.
This ground finch makes sure to fit in amongst this archipelago of misfits by drinking the blood of other birds, and is therefore known as the vampire ground finch.
The vampire ground finch can be found on the Galapagos islands, which are located around 1,000km (600 miles) off the coast of Ecuador.
The vampire ground finch looks a lot like any other finch. You may mistake the red stain on its lips for berry juice, but this one really does have a hankering for bird blood.
It used to be considered a subspecies of the sharp-beaked ground finch, however strong genetic evidence suggests they are not closely related and they are considered their own species.
These are a vulnerable species, endemic to only two islands in the Galapagos, and they’re at risk of extinction from a new parasite.
However, they do appear to be adapting quickly and living up to their names as one of the 13 species of Darwin’s Finches found in the archipelago.
Source: 9 Blood Sucking Vampire Ground Finch Facts - Fact Animal
Quote of the Day:
“You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.”
-Robin Williams
Video of the Day:
Happy birthday to Elvis. Here’s one of my most favourites pieces of music ever:
Happy birthday also to Dame Shirley Bassey, with the most iconic Bond theme (but not my favourite!):
And another happy birthday, this time to David Bowie!
Comic of the Day:
Credit: #107; In which a Head explodes – Wondermark
Inspirobot Always Controversial, Occasionally Inspirational Quote of the Day:
Read @Vikingmichael’s Flying Spark! from https://community.spiceworks.com/t/spark-pro-series-7-january-2025
Don’t forget to leave some spice right here ↓
