census enumerated a population of over 62 million-but it took the Census Bureau nine years to finish its tabulations! By then it was nearly time for another census. Clearly, a technological breakthrough was required before the 1890 census was conducted. The bureau sought suggestions.
Herman Hollerith, a former Census Bureau employee who had worked on the 1880 census, had an idea. Now a young engineering instructor at MIT, he proposed to adapt the Jacquard card to the task of counting the nation’s population. As local tallies were compiled, they would be punched into cards. Then a tabulating machine of Hollerith’s creation would read the cards and determine the population counts for the entire nation.
Hollerith’s system was tested in competition with other proposals and found to be the fastest. As a result, the Census Bureau rented $750000 worth of equipment from Hollerith’s new Tabulation Machine Company, and the 1890 population total was reported within six weeks. Hollerith’s company, incidentally, continued to develop new equipment, merged with other pioneering firms, and was eventually renamed the International Business Machines Corporation: IMB. By the 1950, punched card-commonly called IMB cards-were being adapted for storage and retrieval of social research data. Today they’re still used-although rarely-for that purpose.