Hollerith also invented a sorting machine, to facilitate the tabulation of subsets of the population.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue

Hollerith, a former employee of the Census Bureau, had the idea of building a tabulating machine.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue

Perhaps the fact that Hollerith is forgotten, while Babbage is remembered, should not be so surprising after all.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue

Before long, Hollerith improved this scheme, by using combinations of holes to represent more complex pieces of information.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue

When it came to choosing a tabulating machine for the 1890 census, Hollerith's design was one of three contenders.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue

This success enabled Hollerith to expand his Tabulating Machine Company into overseas markets.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue

The real advantage of Hollerith's system became clear, however, when it came to manipulating the stored data and compiling the results.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue

In a competition between them it took 72 hours to record all the data on to Hollerith's punched cards, which was not vastly faster than the 144 hours and 100 hours taken by the other two machines.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue