Hollerith punch card
Data is a hugely profitable commodity - if you know how to process it. Tim Harford tells the story of Herman Hollerith, and how his 19th-century machine for processing census data laid the foundations for some of the world's most valuable companies.
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Sources
List of public corporations by market capitalization
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Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing. Geoffrey D. Austrian, 1982. Columbia University Press, New York
The Control Revolution: Technical and Economic Origins of the Information Society. James R Beniger, 1986. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. P 408, P 409, P 412, P 416 and P 420 - 421
The Creation and Destruction of the 1890 Federal Census. Robert L. Dorman. The American Archivist, Vol. 71 (Fall/Winter 2008): 350–383
Statistics & German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge, 2008, Adam Tooze. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Edwin Black. 2001. Dialog Press, Washington DC.
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Broadcasts
- Sat 7 Dec 201905:50GMTBBC World Service except East and Southern Africa & South Asia
- Sat 7 Dec 201914:50GMTBBC World Service News Internet
- Sun 8 Dec 201914:50GMTBBC World Service East and Southern Africa & West and Central Africa only
- Sun 8 Dec 201915:50GMTBBC World Service Australasia, UK DAB/Freeview, News Internet, Online & Europe and the Middle East only
- Sun 8 Dec 201922:50GMTBBC World Service
- Mon 9 Dec 201904:50GMTBBC World Service South Asia
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