The immense, cone-capped turret rising beside the towering trees of Garrett Park is perhaps the most prominent feature of the historic house. But the distinction of this quintessentially Victorian villa at 11210 Kenilworth Ave. emanates not only from the architecture, but from the owner, a man whose groundbreaking invention at the end of the 19th century would garner him the title “father of the computer.”
Herman Hollerith was born in Buffalo in 1860, the son of German immigrants who had escaped that country’s political upheaval for the promise of American prosperity. From a young age, Hollerith displayed a keen and curious mind—and a loathing of public education. At 9, the truculent student dropped out of school, and his parents arranged for him to be tutored at home by the family’s Lutheran minister. Despite the rudimentary education, Hollerith’s native intelligence earned him admittance to City College of New York at 15, then to the Columbia University School of Mines, from which he graduated with an engineering degree in 1879. His academic performance so impressed his professor at Columbia, the statistician William Petit Towbridge, that he asked the 19-year-old to stay on as his assistant.
Within a year, Towbridge was appointed chief special agent to the U.S. Census Bureau, and he brought his young associate along to Washington, D.C., installing him as a statistician on the 1880 census. Census work was an arduous task. Tens of thousands of enumerators across the nation collected the vital statistics door to door, inking the facts and figures on large paper schedules, then sending the pages to Washington, where Hollerith and thousands of other government clerks tediously compiled the entries by hand, generating lists for the elucidation of Congress. For the 1880 census, information on more than 50 million people had to be manually tabulated. The process took seven years to complete.
Seeking respite, young Hollerith turned to D.C.’s lively social scene, and it was at a boat club party in the summer of 1881 that his personal and professional lives intersected dramatically. His date for the evening was Kate Sherman Billings, daughter of Dr. John Shaw Billings, a former Army surgeon and the supervisor of the 1880 census. Eager to impress, Hollerith bought every door-prize ticket but one—the winner. Disappointment was soon assuaged at the buffet table, where Hollerith attacked the chicken salad with such gusto that Kate, astonished by his appetite, invited him home to dinner (her mother, it was said, made a great chicken salad).
Over dinner, Hollerith and Billings entered into a conversation that would shape the young man’s future. Billings offhandedly remarked that “there ought to be a machine for doing the purely mechanical work of tabulating population and similar statistics.” After studying the problem, Hollerith came back to Billings confident he could build such a machine. “I asked him if he would go in with me,” Hollerith later recalled. “The doctor said he was not interested any further than to see some solution of the problem worked out.” It would be a costly decision for Billings.
By 1886, Hollerith had perfected his “new and useful improvement in the art of compiling statistics.” In his system, data was encoded on a rectangular card assigned to one person, with holes punched in the cards representing information about that individual— age, sex, race, whatever needed to be tallied. The cards were then run through the “tabulating machine,” passing beneath a series of pins on a roller. When a pin encountered a hole, an electrical connection was made, indicating that the person fell within a certain category. The cards were then sorted accordingly. It was the first modern computer, a punch card system of data storage that would persist well into the 20th century.
That same year, Hollerith field-tested his machine in Baltimore, compiling mortality statistics for the city, a successful trial that brought demands from a growing list of other agencies, from the Bureau of Vital Statistics in New York City to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office in Washington. Hollerith didn’t sell the machines outright, but rented them for $1,000 a year—insuring a steady cash flow for his fledgling enterprise.
Hollerith’s elation over this success, however, was eclipsed by the death of his fiancee, Flora Ferguson, from a typhoid fever sweeping through the District. The tragedy turned Hollerith into a health fanatic; he believed most ailments were caused by poor diet, and suggested eating well was the best curative. In 1888, he became engaged again, this time to Lucia Talcott, from a prominent Georgetown family, but Hollerith continually postponed their wedding, putting business before matrimony.
Hollerith’s success was secured with a contract to supply the Census Bureau with 56 of his tabulating machines for use in the 1890 census. “The machines are a new contrivance in the electric field,” The Washington Post reported, “which have brought their young inventor, Herman Hollerith, lots of fame and cash during the last few months.” The machines reduced a seven-year job to three months—and saved the taxpayers $5 million.
Finally, in September 1890, with the census work well under way, Hollerith and Lucia wed and began the search for a home out in the palliative fresh air of the Maryland countryside, away from the swelter and pestilence of the city. They found a bucolic spot in the new community of Garrett Park, then under construction on a 500- acre wooded tract east of the old Rockville Pike, above the Rock Creek valley, straddling the tracks of the Metropolitan Branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
The community was the vision of Washington attorney Henry N. Copp, who in 1886 formed the Metropolitan Investment and Building Company of Montgomery County, and began sculpting a suburban enclave on a forested hilltop. He named the community in honor of Robert Garrett, then president of the B&O Railroad. The streets referred to the works of the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, including place names—Strathmore, Cambria, Argyle—and book titles such as Kenilworth, Rokeby, Waverley and A Legend of Montrose. The high plateau on which the community sat “is acknowledged to be the one place around Washington which is entirely free from malaria,” the first promotional pamphlet boasted.
Within a year or two, model houses had been constructed by the Metropolitan company—tall, picturesque Victorians that set the village’s architectural tone, offered for rent or sale “on liberal monthly installments.” Other homes would be custom built by the company for new homeowners, following “their own plans and specifications.” The Holleriths selected a large lot on the newly macadamized Kenilworth Avenue and chose a Queen Anne style for their home. Theoretically, the design’s inspiration sprang from the “Old English” or “Queen Anne” revival spawned in Great Britain in the late 1800s, drawing style elements from domestic architecture of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Once the style arrived on American soil, however, it was transformed, becoming a mélange of irregularly massed shapes—towers and gables and wraparound porches—all finished with modish decorative features such as fish-scale shingles, spindle friezes and fan brackets. With the rise of mass production, a nationwide network of railroads to transport prefabricated architectural elements virtually anywhere, and the proliferation of popular, taste-making magazines that regularly touted the style as de rigueur for up-and-coming middle-class families as well as social elites, the Queen Anne home became ubiquitous.
The Holleriths’ house was the height of fashion. Its main facade was dominated by a soaring circular tower, capped with a steep-sloped conical roof, the arrangement anchoring one corner of the gable-forward main block. Both the tower and upper story of the gable were clad in decorative, scalloped wood shingles. The expanses below were covered with narrow clapboards accented by wooden corner boards. A massive porch wrapped around three sides of the house, its balustrade interrupted by turned wood columns topped by ornate brackets, with baluster-type gingerbread trim under the eaves. The decorative elements extended to the upper floor windows, with their double-pane, lower sashes topped by a multi-light arrangement, the center pane surrounded by smaller square panes running around the perimeter. The irregular massing of elements, infused with ornamental extravagances, gave the house a whimsical, fairy tale air.
Inside, the social rooms at the front of the house were large and open, emanating from the central hall, a departure from the closed-off, rigid rectangularity of early homes. It was this free-flowing concept that was perhaps the Queen Anne style’s most lasting contribution to American domestic architecture, an open floor plan that is the norm for domestic design today. The second floor hall led to five bedrooms, with garret stairs providing access to three more bedrooms and the circular turret room, where large windows provided a treetop view of the community. All those bedrooms would be welcome with the gradual arrival of the Holleriths’ six children.
After the house’s completion in 1891, Hollerith joined the ranks of doctors and lawyers and government workers commuting from the green, peaceful enclave to jobs in the bustling city. Twenty-one trains stopped daily at the community station, with a monthly ticket costing $6 for 60 rides. “A railroad ride to Garrett Park from Washington consumes about thirty minutes,” declared a promotional brochure, “which is time enough to enable the Washington business man to peruse his evening newspaper and to reach a safe distance from the marauders that always infest the suburbs of a large city.”
Meanwhile, at the downtown offices of The Hollerith Tabulating Machines, business was whirring as fast as the punchcards through the rollers. Contracts poured in from around the world. Hollerith’s machines would be used for censuses in Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines. Chicago retailer Marshall Field, in the process of turning a small dry goods firm into the world’s largest department store, retained Hollerith to conduct a systematic sales analysis. His machine would tabulate what articles had been sold in a given month by class, item number and value, by date, location, and customer, whether for credit or cash, thus creating the first “scientific” profile of the American consumer.
By age 51, however, the stress of business was beginning to impinge on Hollerith’s health. He sold the now publicly traded company in 1911 to entrepreneur Charles R. Flint. Hollerith’s take was $1.2 million, an impressive amount for the time. Flint would merge the business with his Computing Scale Company of America and the International Time Recording Company to create the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Hollerith stayed on as a consultant, and in 1915, the newly minted millionaire moved out of his suburban Garrett Park home into a palatial Classic Revival home designed by noted architect Frederick B. Pyle on 29th Street in Georgetown. Hollerith’s home wasn’t far from the warehouse where his tabulating machines were assembled, down the hill on 31st Street—now the home of Canal Square and the Sea Catch Restaurant & Raw Bar.
Hollerith worked as a consultant until his retirement in 1921. Three years later, the president of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, Thomas J. Watson, renamed the company International Business Machines, or IBM.
In 1929, Hollerith died of a heart attack, but his Garrett Park home still stands, a reminder of the halcyon days of the area’s suburban beginnings and a remembrance of the man whose fondness for chicken salad engendered the computer revolution.
Mark Walston is an author and historian raised in Bethesda and now living in Olney.
