ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT
When a census of the people of a country is taken, a great quantity of sorting and counting is needed: by village, county, city, and state; by sex; by age; by occupation; etc. In 1886, the census of the people of the United States which had been taken in 1880 was still being sorted and counted. Among the men then studying census problems was a statistician and inventor, Herman Hollerith. He saw that existing methods were so slow that the next census (1890) would not be finished before the following census (1900) would have to be begun. He knew that cards with patterns of holes had been used in weaving patterns in cloth. He realized that the presence or absence of a property, for example employed or unemployed, could be represented by the presence or absence of a hole in a piece of paper. An electrical device could detect the hole, he believed, since it would allow current to flow through, whereas the absence of the hole would stop the current. He experimented with sorting and counting, using punched holes in cards, and with electrical devices to detect the holes and count them. A definite meaning was given to each place in the card where a hole might be punched. Then electrical devices handled the particular information that the punches represented. These devices either counted or added, singly or in various combinations, as might be desired.
More than 50 years of development of punch-card calculating machinery have since then taken place. Several large companies have made quantities of punch-card machines. A great degree of development has taken place in the punch-card machines of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), and for this reason these machines will be the ones described in this chapter. What is said here, however, may also in many ways apply to punch-card machines made by other manufacturers—Remington-Rand, Powers, Control Instrument, etc.