Statistician and inventor Herman Hollerith became known as the father of modern automatic computation for his electric tabulating system, which revolutionized the US census. He was recruited to work ...

1890: The U.S. Census Bureau uses a tabulating machine for the first time. Freed of the laborious process of hand-sorting its data, the bureau is able to produce a complete census within two years.

The concept of surveillance, and essentially big data analytics, can be traced back to Herman Hollerith, whose punched card tabulator was used to speed up the US census process A daily long read and ...