Herman Hollerith (1860–1929) was a German-American statistician who turned big data into a business. The 1890 US Census was expected to take over a decade to count by hand. Inspired by conductors on the railroad punching holes in tickets, Hollerith created his Electric Tabulating Machine, which used punched cards to represent demographic information.
The machine “read” and counted records at lightning speed. It saved the census and introduced the punched-card format that’d dominate data processing for eighty years. He transformed data from a static record into a mobile, machine-readable asset.