Herman Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860, where he also spent his early childhood.^[5] His parents were German immigrants; his father, Georg Hollerith, was a school teacher from Großfischlingen, Rhineland-Palatinate.^[6][7] He entered the City College of New York in 1875, graduated from the Columbia School of Mines with an Engineer of Mines degree in 1879 at age 19, and, in 1890, earned a Doctor of Philosophy based on his development of the tabulating system.^[1][8] In 1882, Hollerith joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he taught mechanical engineering and conducted his first experiments with punched cards.^[9] He eventually moved to Washington, D.C., living in Georgetown with a home on 29th Street and a business building at 31st Street and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, where today there is a commemorative plaque installed by IBM. He died of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., at age 69.^[9]

At the suggestion of John Shaw Billings, Hollerith developed a mechanism using electrical connections to increment a counter, recording information.^[10] A key idea was that a datum could be recorded by the presence or absence of a hole at a specific location on a card. For example, if a specific hole location indicates marital status, then a hole there can indicate married while not having a hole indicates single. Hollerith determined that data in specified locations on a card, arranged in rows and columns, could be counted or sorted electromechanically. A description of this system, An Electric Tabulating System (1889), was submitted by Hollerith to Columbia University as his doctoral thesis,^[11] and is reprinted in Brian Randell's 1982 The Origins of Digital Computers, Selected Papers.^[12] On January 8, 1889, Hollerith was issued U.S. Patent 395,782,^[13] claim 2 of which reads:

The herein-described method of compiling statistics, which consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holes punched in sheets of electrically non-conducting material, and bearing a specific relation to each other and to a standard, and then counting or tallying such statistical items separately or in combination by means of mechanical counters operated by electro-magnets the circuits through which are controlled by the perforated sheets, substantially as and for the purpose set forth.

Hollerith had left teaching and began working for the United States Census Bureau in the year he filed his first patent application. Titled "Art of Compiling Statistics", it was filed on September 23, 1884; U.S. Patent 395,782 was granted on January 8, 1889.^[13]

Hollerith initially did business under his own name, as The Hollerith Electric Tabulating System, specializing in punched card data processing equipment.^[16] He provided tabulators and other machines under contract for the Census Office, which used them for the 1890 census. The net effect of the many changes from the 1880 census: the larger population, the data items to be collected, the Census Bureau headcount, the scheduled publications, and the use of Hollerith's electromechanical tabulators, reduced the time required to process the census from eight years for the 1880 census to six years for the 1890 census.^[17]

In 1896, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company (in 1905 renamed The Tabulating Machine Company).^[18] Many major census bureaus around the world leased his equipment and purchased his cards, as did major insurance companies. Hollerith's machines were used for censuses in England & Wales, Italy, Germany, Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, and again in the 1900 U.S. census.^[1]

He invented the first automatic card-feed mechanism and the first keypunch. The 1890 Tabulator was hardwired to operate on 1890 Census cards. A control panel in his 1906 Type I Tabulator simplified rewiring for different jobs. The 1920s removable control panel supported prewiring and near instant job changing. These inventions were among the foundations of the data processing industry, and Hollerith's punched cards (later used for computer input/output) continued in use for almost a century.^[19]

In 1911, four corporations, including Hollerith's firm, were amalgamated to form a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR).^[20] Under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson, CTR was renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924. By 1933 The Tabulating Machine Company name had disappeared as subsidiary companies were subsumed by IBM.^[21]

Herman Hollerith died November 17, 1929. Hollerith is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C.^[15][22]

Hollerith cards were named after Herman Hollerith, as were Hollerith strings and Hollerith constants. ^[23]

His great-grandson, the Rt. Rev. Herman Hollerith IV, was the Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Southern Virginia, and another great-grandson, Randolph Marshall Hollerith, is an Episcopal priest and the dean of Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.^[24][25]

• Unit record equipment
• History of IBM

• Ashurst, Gareth (1983). Pioneers of Computing. Frederick Muller. pp. 77–90.
• Beniger, James R. (1986/2009) The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Harvard University Press, 1986 pp. 390–425
• Cortada, James W. (1993). Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, & Remington Rand & the Industry they created, 1865 – 1956. Princeton. pp. 344. ISBN 0-691-04807-X.
• Essinger, James (2004). Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280577-5.
• Engelbourg, Saul (1954). International Business Machines: A Business History (PhD dissertation). Columbia University. p. 385. Reprinted by Arno Press, 1976, from the best available copy. Some text is illegible.
• Heide, Lars. "Herman Hollerith". In Jeffrey Fear (ed.). Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present. German Historical Institute, 2017.
• Heide, Lars (2009). Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945. Johns Hopkins. ISBN 978-0-8018-9143-4.
• Hollerith, Herman (April 1889). "An Electric Tabulating System". The Quarterly, Columbia University School of Mines. X (16): 238–255. From the Columbia Univ. History site: This article is the basis for his 1890 Columbia Ph.D. Extracts reprinted in (Randell, 1982).
• Hollerith, Herman (1890). In connection with the electric tabulation system which has been adopted by U.S. government for the work of the census bureau (PhD dissertation). Columbia University School of Mines.
• Hollerith, Herman (December 1894). "The Electrical Tabulating Machine". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 57 (4). Blackwell Publishing: 678–682. doi:10.2307/2979610. JSTOR 2979610. From Randell (1982),"... brief... fascinating article... describes the way in which tabulators and sorters were used on ... 100 million cards ... 1890 census."

• Herman Hollerith (2017) In Immigrant Entrepreneurship Heide, Lars. German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 4, edited by Jeffrey Fear. German Historical Institute. Last modified April 5, 2017. Recommended!!
• Hollerith's patents from 1889: U.S. patent 395,781 U.S. patent 395,782 U.S. patent 395,783
• Columbia University Computing History: Herman Hollerith Hollerith's 1890 Census Tabulator
• IBM Archives: Herman Hollerith at the Wayback Machine (archived 2006-09-04)
• The Tabulating Machine Co. plant at the Wayback Machine (archived 2005-01-21)
• Early Office Museum: Punched Card Tabulating Machines
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F. "Herman Hollerith". MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive. University of St Andrews.
• The Norwegian Historical Data Center: Census 1900 at the Wayback Machine (archived August 6, 2013) Includes a description of the use of Hollerith machines ("complicated, American enumeration machines"), together with illustrations.
• The Research notes on Herman Hollerith collection at Hagley Museum and Library includes the research materials Geoffrey Austrian used to write Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing.
• Herman Hollerith papers at the Library of Congress.
• Richard Hollerith Papers at Hagley Museum and Library. Richard Hollerith was the grandson of Herman Hollerith and part of this collection documents the sale and settlement of the Herman Hollerith estate following the death of his last remaining child, Virginia.
• Fleishman, Sandra (March 5, 2005). "$8.5 Million And Counting". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 4, 2010. – Hollerith's house