Chapter 2 - Across the Atlantic

When squash crossed the Atlantic in 1884, it did not democratize — it deepened its class associations, arriving at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and spreading through Ivy League clubs, university athletic programs, and the social networks of American privilege. America did not open squash to everyone; it gave squash a more thoroughly elite home than it had ever had in England. Simultaneously, Herman Hollerith crossed a different kind of Atlantic, applying Babbage's punch card concept to the 1890 United States Census and demonstrating that mechanical information processing was practically superior to human labor — a commercial motivation that pure mathematics had never provided. The company Hollerith founded would eventually become IBM. Both ideas had crossed the ocean. Both had found institutional homes that would shape their trajectories for decades.