News & Events 2001-2002

John Bogle '47, Inaugural Hollerith Lecturer

John C. Bogle '47, founder of the Vanguard Group and president of the Bogle Financial Market Research Group gave the inaugural Herman Hollerith lecture on April 2, in the DuBois Theatre of the Armstrong-Hipkins Center for the Arts.

This lecture series, named for entrepreneur and engineer Herman Hollerith (inventor of the punch card), debuted with Bogle, a 1947 Blair graduate and founder of one of the world’s largest mutual fund companies. Bogle graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with an AB in economics in 1951. The Washington Post noted, “Jack Bogle has the mind of an economist and the personality of a preacher.” A member of the Blair Academy Board of Trustees, he served as Chairman of the Board from 1986-2001.

Bogle spoke of the faculty at Blair who taught and guided him, including Jesse Witherspoon Gage and Marvin Garfield Mason, as well as the fact that he and his brothers were scholarship students. He joked about his math grades (going from 40 to 100!) and declared that his education at Blair was the reason he matriculated to Princeton University. “No Blair, no Princeton,” he said. As a student, he read an article about mutual funds in Fortune magazine, a topic he would later address in his college thesis. The subject continued to pique his interest, and he eventually accepted a position with Wellington Management Company upon graduation from Princeton. (It seems the firm was impressed by his thesis and approached him with a job offer.)

Mrs. Hollerith with Marty Miller, History Department Chair.

Bogle spoke of founding the Vanguard Group and his philosophy that the success of the company was based on “serving the shareholder.” He spoke of the structure of the company and the strategy upon which it was based. “Strategy follows structure,” he said. He also drew parallels between his life and that of his great grandfather, Philander Armstrong, who lived during the time of Herman Hollerith. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the entrepreneurial tree,” he quipped.

Bogle later entertained questions from the audience, specifically from students, who posed queries regarding the downturn in the stock market, the plight of the airline industry and the seeming lack of ethics on the part of Enron, Arthur Andersen and other companies recently in the news. He spoke of the importance of character and declared that business is best served by virtue.

Herman Hollerith, the son of German immigrants, graduated from the Columbia College School of Mines in 1879. He followed one of his professors to Washington, D.C., to work as a special agent on the U.S. Census of 1880. Shortly thereafter, he invented punch cards to help automate the census. These cards were the earliest widely used mechanical system for processing enormous amounts of data. Punched with holes representing numbers or other data, they were fed into a machine that converted the holes into electromechanical impulses for further tallying or processing.

In 2000, The Economist magazine identified the event of Hollerith’s tabulating machine system as one of the 10 most important events in science and technology in the last 100 years, as it marked the beginning of today’s data processing industry.

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