History of Early Computers - part 2

The next breakthrough occurred in America. The U.S. Constitution states that a census should be taken of all U.S. citizens every 10 years. By 1880 the U.S. population had grown so much that the count for the 1880 census took 7.5 years! The census bureau offered a prize for an inventor to help with the 1890 census and this prize was won by Herman Hollerith, who proposed and then successfully adopted Jacquard's punched cards for the purpose of computation.

Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk (left), consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using Pascal's mechanism which we still see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial indicators (a car speedometer is a dial indicator) to display the results of the count. The key idea to Hollerith’s method was to record all of the data on to cards similar to the original computer punch cards.  He got the idea for this method from watching a conductor punch out a description of an individual on a train!

Continue to part 3