The merger combined Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company, which had automated the 1890 US Census using punched cards, with the International Time Recording Company and the Computing Scale Company. Renamed IBM in 1924 under Thomas Watson, the firm grew into the dominant force in twentieth-century computing.
Herman Hollerith invented his punch-card tabulator to solve a genuine crisis: the 1880 US Census had taken nearly eight years to fully tabulate by hand, and officials feared the 1890 count would not be finished before the next census began. Hollerith's electromechanical machines, inspired partly by the punch-card patterns used to control railroad conductors' tickets, read holes in cards representing each citizen's data and completed the tabulation in about a year.
His Tabulating Machine Company thrived on government and business contracts for record-keeping. In 1911, financier Charles Flint engineered a merger bringing together Hollerith's company with makers of employee time clocks and grocery scales into the unglamorously named Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.
The real transformation came when Thomas J. Watson took over as general manager in 1914 and, over the following decade, built a relentless sales culture and international footprint. In 1924 he renamed the company International Business Machines. The punch-card technology Hollerith devised to count Americans in 1890 became, through decades of incremental engineering, the ancestor of the data-processing machines and eventually computers that made IBM synonymous with corporate computing for most of the twentieth century.
Key people: Herman Hollerith, Charles Flint