People: Charles Babbage was born in 1792 in Devonshire, England. He became a consulting engineer and developed a system of identifying lighthouses by the rhythm of their flashes, suggested the use of cowcatchers on locomotives, and invented the speedometer. He went to college in Cambridge, and there he formed one club: To Investigate Advanced Mathematical Problems. He was always interested in tables of logarithms, of trigonometric functions like sines and cosines. In a biography of him, he is quoted saying, "I am thinking that all these tables, they might be calculated on a machine." In 1822 he wrote "On the Theoretical Principles of the Machinery for Calculating Tables." He sent it to the Royal Astronomical Society where he won the gold medal. He was given funds to start his work. For four years he repeatedly redesigned it mostly due to the reason that the tools that he needed were not invented yet. The original machine was designed to compute mathematical tables. Now he was going for an all around machine that could calculate anything if it was programmed correctly, namely, the calculator. He never was able complete, let alone make the calculator before he died. Some may call him a failure, but really, he opened up more ideas for more people. Herman Hollerith Herman Hollerith was born almost seventy years after Babbage. He was an engineer for Columbia School of Mines until he left in 1879 for a job in the US Census Bureau. Each census had to be manually counted. In 1880 the census took seven and a half years. It is quoted that he once said to a coworker of his that "There ought to be some mechanical way to count the census." He took this idea a little farther than most people would have. He invented a way to mechanically count the census. His idea used punch cards. It was not completely original because in the 19th century, a Frenchman, Joseph Marie Jacquard, invented a punch card device to control how the loom worked. The way Hollerith's device worked was that holes in the card could represent sex, martial status, number of children, and more. All he needed was a way to transfer the census to the punch card. Once that was done, the cards would slide over several needles (one for each spot in the punch card), in place, the needles would be released. They would be pushed up to the punch card, if it went through the hole then it would plunge into a little cup of mercury, completing the circuit. If there was no hole, the needle could not go through. It would not complete the circuit and would not be counted. Soon after it was invented, the 1890 census bureau held a competition to see who had the most effective way of counting the census. W. Hunt had a system, which had different colored cards. It took fifty-five (55) hours to complete. C. Pidgen had a system that had colored tokens. That took forty-four (44) hours. H. Hollerith�s system with the punch cards took five and a half-hours (5 1/2), one-third the time of the others.