From the Bible, Doomsday Book and beyond…

From the Bible to the Doomsday book and beyond the importance of data for recognising financial opportunities has always been there.  What has changed, is our ability to process and transform that raw data into useful information.  From the early tally marks used to count livestock, developing into the abacus for more complex calculations, data collection has always been at the heart of both government and business commerce. 

In an advancing society and ever-expanding population, data collection became more important with the possibilities of taxation and so the tools to analyse this data also needed to advance in order to make the data useful before it became obsolete. 

Relying on people to work through the data and make any sense of it, was inefficient and time consuming, something Herman Hollerith was well aware of having worked on the 1880 American census and he hit upon a solution in time for the 1890 census. 

Having observed train guards creating a “Punched Photograph” to link the tickets to the passengers, Hollerith had the vision to realise that by creating a card for each individual, using patterns of holes in rows and columns to represent each answer, the data could be analysed by machine.  By punching a hole for a yes answer and not for a no, where the machine found a hole an electrical circuit would be completed, and a count made.  This machine was named the Hollerith Electric Tabulating System and completed in six years what had previously taken eight years saving both time and money. 

Whilst this might still seem along way from where we ae today it was the business potential that led to the success of Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine company. As advances in technology moved from punch cards to magnetic data storage the humble beginnings of the programmable commuter revolutionised both the speed of data capture and processing.  Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine company was the market leader and through a round about path emerged in 1924 as the International Business Machines Corporation or as we know it IBM, a company that still dominates the business world. 

The face of data collection today is very different, no longer do businesses and governments have to rely on census and surveys to gather information, now we all leave a trail of data behind us, free for anyone with the technology and will to collect from social media, online shopping, mobile devices, online banking, Netflix choices… and the list goes on.  The difficulty is in keeping up with this avalanche of data and making sense of information that can no longer be represented as yes or no answers. As the data becomes more complex the systems needed to make the information more meaningful have become more specialised and the data economy expands to fulfil that need. 

Thanks to the following sources used during research:

Hollerith and the “Punched Photograph” http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/images/VIE_04_003.pdf (Accessed 07.02.20) 

Herman Hollerith – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith (accessed 07.02.20) 

The man who got rich on data – years before Google, Tim Harford, 08.01.20  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50578234 (accessed 07.02.20)