emporary loss of interest in automatic digital computers. Between 1850 and 1900 more advances were made in mathematical physics. It came to be known that most observable dynamic phenomena could be identified by differential equations, meaning that most events occurring in nature can be measured or described by one equation or another. This led way to easier means for calculations. Also, the availability of steam power caused manufacturing, transportation, and commerce to prosper. This led to a period advanced engineering achievements. The designing of railroads, and the making of steamships, textile mills, and bridges required differential calculus to determine such things as center of gravity, center of buoyancy, moment of inertia, and stress distributions. Even the assessment of the power output of a steam engine needed mathematical integration. A strong need thus developed for a machine that could rapidly perform many repetitive calculations. A step towards automated computing was the development of punched cards. Herman Hollerith and James Powers, both of whom worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, were the first to successfully use punched cards with computers in 1890. They developed devices that could read the information that had been punched into the cards automatically, without human help. Because of this, reading errors were reduced dramatically, workflow increased, and stacks of punched cards could be used as easily accessible memory of almost unlimited size. Furthermore, different problematic equations could be stored on different stacks of cards and accessed when needed. These advantages were seen by commercial companies and soon led to the development of improved punch-card using computers created by International Business Machines (IBM), Remington, Burroughs, and other corporations. These computers used electromechanical devices in which electrical power provided mechanical motion. ...
