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18871776 Club

Hollerith files "Art of Compiling Statistics"; holes punched in cards will read back by machine

The Columbia-trained statistician files his first patent application, describing a system that stores census data as punched holes and retrieves it electromechanically.

By 1884, the United States Census Bureau faced a problem it could not solve with pencils and ledger sheets: the 1880 census had taken eight years to tabulate, and the next one was already approaching. Herman Hollerith, a German-American statistician from Buffalo who had studied at the Columbia School of Mines, filed his first patent application — titled "Art of Compiling Statistics" — on September 23, 1884, describing a system that stored data as holes punched in cards and read it back electromechanically. U.S. Patent 395,782 was granted on January 8, 1889. The company Hollerith built on that patent eventually became IBM…

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More from June 8
1789

Madison rises in the House with a list of amendments; rivals are still calling for a second convention

Drawing on more than two hundred proposals from state ratifying conventions, he moves to revise the Constitution before its opponents can dismantle it.
1906

Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act; no proclamation needed from Congress to seal off federal land

For decades, pot hunters have stripped pottery and bones from Chaco Canyon and across the Southwest. The president can now designate national monuments alone, by proclamation.
1861

Tennessee votes to leave the Union; the eleventh state is also the last

Middle Tennessee swings from 51 percent against secession in February to 88 percent in favor today, providing the decisive margin, though East Tennessee refuses to accept the result.
17761776 Club
A local farmer leads the 2,000-man column off the road as British reinforcements land behind them, cutting off any retreat north.
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More from Gilded Age & Progressive Era
1893

A schoolteacher rides a mule to 14,000 feet and writes a poem called "Pikes Peak"

Katharine Lee Bates jots the first lines in a notebook, with a nation in economic depression spread out below her.
1898

The American flag rises over ʻIolani Palace; Hawaii's sovereignty ends in a ceremony

Queen Liliʻuokalani stays away, waiting out the hour at Washington Place instead.
1898

Spain surrenders Manila after a battle both sides agreed to fake

Governor-General Jáudenes chose defeat by Americans over capture by Filipino rebels camped at the city walls.
1916

In Washington, the U.S. and Britain sign a treaty to save the birds crossing their shared border

Great Britain signs for Canada, binding two nations to one set of hunting rules for birds that recognize neither.
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