He was born on February 29, 1860 in Buffalo, New York, USA

Parents were immigrants to the United States from Germany in 1848 after political disturbances in that country.

He graduated from Columbia University, New York in 1879 with a bachelor's degree and a Ph.D. in 1890.

The U.S. Census Bureau had taken eight years to complete the 1880 census, and it was feared that the 1890 census would take even longer.

In 1881, Herman Hollerith began designing a machine to tabulate census data more efficiently than by traditional hand methods.

Herman Hollerith invented and used a punched card device to help analyze the 1890 US census data.

His machines were used for the 1890 census and accomplished in one year what would have taken nearly ten years of hand tabulating.

Herman Hollerith first got his idea for the punch-card tabulation machine from watching a train conductor punch tickets.

For his tabulation machine he used the punch card invented in the early 1800s, by a French silk weaver called Joseph-Marie Jacquard.

Herman Hollerith's great breakthrough was his use of electricity to read, count, and sort punched cards whose holes represented data gathered by the census-takers.

When wires moved through the holes in the cards, it would touch a cup of mercury and complete a circuit to move a mechanical counter.

Hollerith's punch cards and tabulating machines were a step towards automated computation. His device could automatically read information which had been punched onto the cards.

In 1896, Herman Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company to sell his invention; the Company renamed to IBM in 1924.

He died on November 17, 1929 in Washington D.C., USA

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blhollerith.htm
http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/%7Ehistory/Mathematicians/Hollerith.html