Herman Hollerith created the punched-card tabulating machine used in the 1890 United States census.
Hollerith, an American inventor and statistician, designed machines that read holes punched into paper cards. Each hole represented information about a person, such as age or place of residence. Electrical contacts detected the holes and advanced counters, allowing census data to be processed far faster than by manual tabulation.
The 1890 census used Hollerith’s system and was completed in about two years, compared with the much longer manual work expected under older methods. His company later became part of the corporate lineage that led to IBM.
Hollerith’s cards were used for data processing, not for controlling a loom. That distinction separates his invention from Joseph Marie Jacquard’s punched cards, which automated weaving patterns in the early nineteenth century.