ASHINGTON - Poor Herman Hollerith must be tossing in his grave. As the punch card's inventor some 110 years ago, Hollerith is the natural parent of the pesky chads bedevilling vote counters in the presidential election.
In the 19th century, Hollerith, a US Census Bureau statistician, came up with the idea of cards that could be punched and processed by machine as a means to speed up census taking.
The bureau adopted his invention in 1890 and accelerated the census from a decade-long process to one that took a bit more than two years, saving $5 million in the process.
The little pieces of cardboard or paper that were punched out eventually became known as chad or chads, but not until 1947.
Even the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary does not know why. Chad is defined as ''small pieces of paper or cardboard produced in punching paper tape or data cards,'' with the term's origin unknown, the dictionary says.
But the little pieces of paper have become big news since Nov. 7, especially in Florida.
At issue is whether incompletely punched-out chads - known as hanging, swinging, dimpled, or pregnant chads - might still give a good idea of voters' intentions when found on ballots.
For at least one research scientist who did his own tests, the answer is clear.
''I shuffled punch cards, I riffled them, I hit their edges individually and in groups against a table top, I waved them vigorously through the air,'' retired scientist Jerry Tobias, who worked for the Federal Aviation Administration and the Navy, said in a letter to The New York Times.
''I bent them and twisted them and dropped them on the floor,'' he wrote. ''I wiped them off with my palm. The only stuff that fell out of them was from holes that had already been punched.''
Tobias's point, he said in a phone interview, is that it takes a lot to knock out a chad, but that a puncher's intent can be clear from a partly dislodged chad.
A former researcher in sensory psychology, Tobias said he did his tabletop research on chads in the 1970s and 1980s and found that even a slight misalignment might make a chad impossible to punch out fully and prevent the machine reading it from counting it.
''You'd pull the ones that the machines couldn't see,'' Tobias said. ''The ones that the machine couldn't read, you ought to try to read.''
Chads had their heyday in the 1960s, when International Business Machines Corp. used thousands of punch cards, producing snowdrifts of chads during data processing by big, mainframe computers.
So-called chad boxes had to be emptied daily, but some IBM old-timers recall that punch card operators used to save chads for wedding confetti.
IBM, which is still in the data business, is a descendant of the Tabulating Machine Co., founded by Hollerith in 1924 after he left the Census Bureau.
