Andy Graham 

Herman Hollerith, born in 1860 in New York, is widely considered to be the inventor of the punch card as a tool for information processing. As is often the case fame doesn’t always land with the true inventor of an idea, but we will come back to that shortly. As a young man Hollerith worked at the Census Bureau, as a statistician during the 1880 US census. His experiences of the huge amount of manual processing of data involved, made him realise that it was too slow and error prone a process. From this experience, he came up with an approach for the automation of the census data processing activities.