And Hollerith, an employee of the Census Bureau, immediately
realized this could be adapted to make tabulating the census much
easier. The first use involved rods, sort of like knitting needles,
stuck through the holes to select the cards representing census
data corresponding to those holes. Others dropped out, and the
remaining ones could be readily counted.
He eventually left and organized a company which became the
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. In 1924 it changed its
name to International Business Machines Corporation.
Wes Leatherock
wleath@s...
On Wed, 4 Apr 2001 jworones@y... wrote:
> Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 20:51:01 -0000
> From: jworones@y...
> Reply-To: BRHSlist@yahoogroups.com
> To: BRHSlist@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [BRHSlist] ticket punches
>
> Here's an amazingly useless but neat fact I came across today.
>
> In the Spring 2001 issue of American Heritage of Invention &
> Technology, there's a short article on the development of the punch
> card. What's interesting is:
>
> "...One day in the early 1880s, the inventor Herman Hollerith noticed
> that his railroad ticket was perforated with a peculiar pattern of
> holes. Each hole, he learned, had been punched in a specific place to
> correspond to a specific physical characteristic: height, eye color,
> size of nose, and so forth. Conductors did this to keep someone from
> picking a discarded ticket and pretending it was his own."
>
> There you have it!
>
> Jeff Worones
> Las Vegas, NV
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