ABSTRACT
James Powers, an employee of the U.S. Census Bureau, immediately saw the potential of the calculating machine. From his experience with Hollerith’s machines at the Census Bureau, he developed an improved calculating machine, and, using his contacts at the Census Bureau, he managed to get the contract for the 1910 census. Having lost his principal customer, Hollerith approached Charles Flint, a nancier and arms merchant, to get him to invest in the business to undertake further improvements in his machine. But Flint, seeing the opportunity to broaden his company’s line of business machines, decided to acquire Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company and merged it with ITR and Computing Scale to form the Computing Tabulating & Recording Company (CTR). This formed the seed of what was to become IBM.
