The Racist Origins of America’s Tech Industry
How the tools built to conduct the U.S. Census fueled Nazi genocide, internment, and state-sanctioned racism — and helped usher in the digital age
On a freezing day in December 1896, an American inventor by the name of Herman Hollerith rushed to catch a train out of the Russian city of St. Petersburg. He wore a fur cap and a thick fur-lined coat with a huge collar buttoned up all the way over his ears. It covered his mouth as well as his big droopy mustache — leaving just a bit of pink flesh peeking out at the world.
Hollerith was a hypochondriac who preferred staying at home with his wife and mother-in-law, tinkering with inventions. He hated travel, and he hated traveling in Europe most of all. Like a 19th-century version of a tech bro, he was obsessed with efficiency and mocked the locals for being bogged down by time-wasting traditions. “They are all living in what happened thousands of years ago,” he wrote to his wife from Italy. “I saw them cutting lumber on the road from Naples to Pompeii, and, when I got to Pompeii, I found paintings on walls showing exactly the same way of cutting lumber.”
For all his grumbling about travel, the inventor had come far in his own life. Hollerith was only 36 years old and had been…
