Herman Hollerith designs an electromechanical punched-card system for the 1890 United States census, managing to tabulate the results in three years compared to the more than ten the manual process would have taken for the previous census. The idea for punched cards arose from observing train conductors who punched tickets in specific positions to record passengers' physical traits and prevent fraud — not from Babbage's work, with whom he had no documented contact. Hollerith adopted the punched-card principle independently, applying it to mass statistical processing: classifying, sorting, and tallying census data via electric currents, without performing complex algebraic calculations. In 1896 he founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which in 1911 merged with other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), renamed in 1924 as IBM.