born Feb. 29, 1860, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S.
died Nov. 17, 1929, Washington, D.C.
U.S. inventor.
He attended Columbia University's School of Mines and later assisted in the 1880 U.S. census. By the time of the 1890 census, he had invented machines to record statistics by electrically reading and sorting punched cards, and the census results were consequently obtained in one-third the time required in 1880. In 1896 he founded the Tabulating Machine Co., which later became IBM Corp. Hollerith's electromechanical sensing and punching devices were forerunners of the input/output units of later computers.