Chapter 307: The Card and the Name

Herman Hollerith was born in Buffalo on the twenty-ninth of February, 1860; His parents had come from Germany. In 1879 he left the School of Mines Of Columbia, and went, under his teacher William P. Trowbridge, to the census, keen, Onto the count of 1880, still being tallied by hand in columns and lines When the next was already coming due. Clerks made marks; the marks stood for persons. John Shaw Billings, who had the vital statistics, urged him on: The mechanical part of a count ought to be a machine's. And the burden's Weight was not the names: it was the sorting. In 1887 he had one Running on the health records of Baltimore and of New Jersey: deaths, the dead Counted first, before the living of the next census. In 1888 the Census Office Held a contest: four areas of St. Louis, out of the 1880 returns, to be read Off the sheets and sorted. Charles F. Pidgin entered, and William C. Hunt; the race was run, and Hollerith's Machine took seventy-two and a half hours to capture what the others took a hundred and more, And five and a half to prepare it for the tables, where theirs took more than forty. He had applied that September; on the eighth of January, 1889, the patent, the door To the age of the machine, was issued: number 395,781, the art of compiling statistics. The story Of the census of 1890 begins as of the first of June; the first was a Sunday, So the enumerators went out on the second. Robert P. Porter was superintendent Of an office not yet a bureau, a temporary office in the Department of the Interior. One day, One sheet to a family, as no other count of this country gave; on each sheet, attendant On the household, the name of each person, written down. The first total given out Was not read from cards: for that pass the reader was taken off, a keyboard put in its place; And in six weeks the rough count stood at 62,947,714. It was widely said, without a doubt, The country held seventy-five million; the lower number was not believed. But the race Was the machine's. The cards were the work after that: a card for a person, blank, One corner cut, so a card fed wrong would show; three and a quarter inches by seven and three eighths; The words on a template over it; a clerk with a stylus, pressing, rank on rank, About five hundred in a day, and a hole where the template held a category. The faiths And the peoples were in the schedule's words for race: white, black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, Chinese, Japanese, or Indian; and any one of them could be a hole. The reader was two plates and a lever: the card between them, the plates closed, and soon Pins came down, and a pin that found a hole went through into mercury, and the whole Circuit closed; a hand moved on a dial; a bell rang; a drawer was named for the card. The 1890 machine had forty dials; a practiced clerk could pass eighty cards a minute; Some sixty million cards went through the readers. It was a wonder, and it was hard Work made light: a labor counted in years, and the machine cut the years, and the limit Of the hand was passed. A hand tally of the last count was not going to be done Before the law required the next; the circuit did what the columns of marks could not. The speed was a real overcoming. The machine is one of the living's works, and one Of the ways the living know themselves: a count is how a people learns what it has got, How a state learns its size, how a nation sees itself whole, its births, its dead, its land. The number the census carries is 62,979,766; in 1880 it had been 50,189,209: An increase of twenty-five and a half in the hundred. Twenty-five volumes, planned From the tally, were published. Porter resigned on the thirty-first of July, 1893; the line Of the office ran on: an act of the second of March, 1895, closed the Census Office, And the unfinished work went on under the Interior until the first of July, 1897. The holes were the answers: age, sex, place of birth, and race. The name was not; and this Is the other half: to come back from a card to a person, you needed the sheet, the given Name on the family's page. On the tenth of January, 1921, a fire began In the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington. The schedules of 1890 lay Outside the vault, stacked on shelves in the path of the burning. And the man Who directed the census, Samuel Lyle Rogers, reported the next day That about a quarter were destroyed, and half of what remained was damaged By water, smoke and fire. On the twenty-first of February, 1933, Congress authorized the spoiled remainder's destruction; it was managed By 1935. Of the general schedules, 6,160 names remain to see. The special schedules of Union veterans, and of their widows, came through another way: About seventy-five thousand sheets survived, and the soldiers were kept; The living of that June, almost all of them, were not. The printed total, though, would stay Whole: 62,979,766 is a true number, and the count is not a debt Owed to the names; it is its own good, how a people knows its size. This calendar keeps names, and it keeps the count; the card was built to keep a class, the sheet a name, And the sheet was the part that burned. Count the persons; keep the names; let both rise Together: the machine that counts the living and the book that keeps the dead are kin, and the same.