descriptions. Hollerith was originally inspired by railroad tickets that let the conductor encode a rough description of the passenger:

When use of the ticket punch proved tiring and error-prone, Hollerith developed the pantograph "keyboard punch". It featured an enlarged diagram of the card, indicating the positions of the holes to be punched. A printed reading board could be placed under a card that was to be read manually.

Hollerith envisioned a number of card sizes. In an article he wrote

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