The decennial United States Census was mandated by the U. S. Constitution in 1789 for the purposes of apportioning representatives and taxes. The first census was taken in 1790 when the U. S. population was under four million. It simply counted free men. But by 1880, the country had grown to over 50 million, and the census itself had become much more complicated, recording dependents, parents, places of birth, property, and income.

Figure 4 Hollerith

The 1880 census took over eight years to compile. The United States Census Bureau realized that some sort of automation would be required to complete the 1890 census. They hired a young engineer named Herman Hollerith, who had proposed a system of electronic tabulating machines that would use punched cards to record the data.

This was the first successful application of automated data processing. It was a huge success. The total population of nearly 62 million was reported after only six weeks of tabulation.

Hollerith was awarded a Ph.D. from MIT for his achievement. In 1911, he founded the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which became the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924. Recently IBM built the supercomputer Watson, which was probably the most successful commercial application of data mining and artificial intelligence yet produced.