Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

was employed to work on the 1880 United States Census, which was the first census
to collect not only population data but also to be concerned with economic issues
(Essinger, 2004). Hollerith’s census experience revealed a marked need to automate
the processing of the huge amount of information that had been collected.
While engaged in work upon the tenth census, the writer’s attention was called to
the methods employed in the tabulation of population statistics and the enormous
expense involved. These methods were at the time described as ‘barbarous[;]
some machine ought to be devised for the purpose of facilitating such tabulations’.
(Hollerith, 1889, p. 239)
Hollerith’s response was to represent census information using punched cards
(Austrian, 1982; Comrie, 1933; Hollerith, 1889). A standard punched card, called a
tabulating card, measured 18.7 cm by 8.3 cm, and its upper left hand corner was
beveled to prevent the card from being incorrectly oriented. A blank tabulating card
consisted of 80 vertical columns, with 12 different positions in each column through
which a hole could be punched. The card itself acted as an electrical insulator and
was passed through a wire brush and a brass roller. The brush and roller came in
contact wherever a hole had been punched, completing an electrical circuit and permitting
specific information to be read from a card and acted upon (Eckert, 1940).
Hollerith invented a set of different devices for manipulating tabulating cards.
These included a card punch for entering data by punching holes in cards, a verifier
for checking for data entry errors, a counting sorter for sorting cards into different
groups according to the information punched in any column of interest, a tabulator
or accounting machine for adding numbers punched into a set of cards, and a
multiplier for taking two different numbers punched on a card, computing their
product, and punching the product onto the same card. Hollerith’s devices were
employed during the 1890 census. They saved more than two years of work and $5
million dollars, and permitted complicated tables involving relationships between
different variables to be easily created (Essinger, 2004).
In Hollerith’s system, punched cards represented information, and the various
specialized devices that he invented served as the primitive processes available for
manipulating information. Control, however, was not mechanized—it was provided
by a human operator of the various tabulating machines in a room. “The calculating
process was done by passing decks of cards from one machine to the next,
with each machine contributing something to the process” (Williams, 1997, p. 253).
This approach was very powerful. In what has been described as the first book
about computer programming, Punched Card Methods in Scientific Computation
(Eckert, 1940), astronomer Wallace Eckert described how a set of Hollerith’s
machines—a punched card installation—could be employed for harmonic analysis,
for solving differential equations, for computing planetary perturbations, and for
performing many other complex calculations.
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