The Story>Hollerith Tabulating Machine

The Committee on Science and the Arts of the Franklin Institute awarded Hollerith the prestigious Elliot Cresson Medal for his "machine for tabulating large numbers of statistical data" in February 1890. He received several other honors, including the Gold Medal of the 1889 Paris Exposition and the Bronze Medal of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893.

In 1896, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company for the marketing and production of his tabulating system, which was at the time in a transition phase from census statistical work to commercial applications. His system was used again for the United States census of 1900. In 1902, Congress made the Census Bureau a permanent institution and it began preparations for the census of 1910. For a number of reasons, especially the expiring of Hollerith`s main patents in mid-1906, the Bureau decided to develop a tabulator of its own, which was in place in time for the 1910 census.

A 1911 merger transformed the Tabulating Machine Company into the Computer Tabulating Recording Company (CTR). Hollerith served as a consulting engineer with CTR until 1921. In 1924, CTR was renamed International Business Machines Corporation, better known today as IBM.