| Show i S THE NEW CENSUS How Porters Electrical Machines are Being Worked HE SAYS THE WEST IS ALL RIGHT A Look at the Census Cannery and Something V About the Din of Its Card i Stampers WASHINGTON April 16 1891Speclal correspondence of THE HERALD The work of the new census goes rapidly on and today thirtyfive hundred heads are buzzing buz-zing with figures and seven thousand hands l I V are working away here in Washington on the reports that have come in by the millions mil-lions from every nook and corner of the United States It has cost millions of dollars dol-lars to get these reports and about fifty thousand different men have been at work during the past year in getting them together to-gether They cover all our territory from Alaska to Florida and they deal with the men and women of today in every quarter ofthis whole country They tell just what kind of people they are give reports of all their ailments and all their good points tell all about their property and in short describe de-scribe everything with which they are connected con-nected These reports contain full particulars partic-ulars of the individual and corporate wealth V of the country They tell what our manufacturers manu-facturers and farmers are doing and they are in fact the records of Uncle Sams great account of stock which ho takes every ten years in which he figures up his men women wo-men and children together with his farm animals and puts down on paper just what everything connected with them is worth UXCLB SAMS STOCKTAKING It is impossible to conceive the immensity of this stocktaking The counting of the people themselves was a gigantic task butt but-t it was completed months ago and we now know that we have just about sixtyfive million souls in the United States Each one of these people however has a history cmd the story of everyone has been written down on a page of long foolscap paper and has been sent here to Washington There ire sixtyfive million of these pages and I if vno of the census officers tells me that if these were made of the thinnest of writing paper and laid flat one on top of the other they would make a pile of sheets higher than the Washington monument and so heavy that it would take several camelback camel-back engines to carry them The counting of the people from these slips was done within a few weeks and the count was registered reg-istered by electricity Commissioner of the Census Porter tells me his machinery is such that he could count the whole world in three months and this counting is going on here in a way that has been done in no census heretofore The Australian government govern-ment has just written asking about it and the German English and French are looking look-ing on with wonder at our electrical census taking With these machines Mr Porters Por-ters clerks counted four million people a a day and ho had for a time relays of clerks so that the work went on day and night and the result is that this census is being taken quicker than any census of history The tenth census that of 18SO published nothing to speak of until 1SS5 and its compendium com-pendium was not out until that date Mr J Porter tells me that he will have the compendium t com-pendium of this census published and in the hands of the people before the next Congress meets and this compendium will consist of two large volumes about the size of Blackstones Commentaries and it will contain the complete summary of all the information in-formation gathered during the present census cen-sus The work of the census will altogether alto-gether comprise eleven large volumes each the size of the average law book and these will give the figures and generalizations in regard to everything in the United States COUNTING BT ELECTRICITY The greatest part of this work is done by electricity These millions of schedules are handed over to hundreds of clerks and they by a system of numbers strike keys in a sort of a cribbage board machine which punches holes in little cards in such places as tell exactly what the schedules record The cards are twice as long as a postal card and of the same width By looking at them the clerks can tell whether the man wae a soldier a pauper or an idiot whether he was a criminal or a preacher or whether the card represents the record of a woman or a child of two months old It will tell whether the woman is married single widow or divorced and each of theserec ords is made by the touching of a button 2 instead of by writing out the full name It R is a shorthand run by a typewriting machine and it is so rapid that one woman put down tho histories of fifty thousand people in one day upon fifty thousand of mi these cards These cards are of uniform size Each man woman and child of the United States will have one of them here They will be probably stored away and indexed in-dexed and a hundred years from now your childrens children will be able to come here and to find out all about you to rako up the record of your diseases and to know whether you were married divorced in debt insane and the Lord knows what olse After these holes are punched on the card it is taken to another typewriting machine run by electricity before which another brighteyed nimblefingered girl sits and she by putting the card under a metal plate and shoving a punch records on a dial Just what there is on the card At this same time a little box opens automatically for the cards that are like one another and in this way the generalization is done It is done in such a manner that it cannot make mistakes and with the least possible 11III exercise of brain work on the part of tho operator It is the nearest approach of material substance being made to do the work of an intelligent being I have ever seen ana it is estimated that it will saveS save-S tho government hundreds of thousands of dollars Each of these machines is run by electricity Thoy look like little cabinet organs and as the keys are struck bells ring on each of the machines and the whole room jingles as though an hundred silvery eleighbells were being shaken at the same time They were invented by a young man named Hollerith who was connected with the last census and gets three dollars a day for the use of each machine I understand that the Austrian government intends to introduce them into its censustaking and the process will probably be adopted everywhere every-where COMMISSIONER PORTERS CANNERY I visited tho different buildings of the census with Mr Porter the commissioner He is a darkfaced brighteyed black haired welldressed young man of about thirtyseven who has for the pasteighteen years been delving in facts and figures and 4 making money out of the digging At eighteen he went on the Chicago InterOcean und a few years later traveled all over the west getting up information for that paper about the western states The InterOcean paid him well for this and he sold tho letters let-ters in book form after it was over to a publisher for 1000 Ho was connected I with the last census with the tariff commission com-mission and his whole life has been one of facts and figures As we wont from building V build-ing to building located at wide distances t apart over the city T referred to the immense im-mense amount which the United States was paying in rent and asked him what his rents amounted to He replied that the census paid 40000 a year and that the ijov crnment could make a big interest by constructing con-structing its own building The building in which the census clerks do their chief work is a narrow tall cheap affair constructed con-structed for flats and another building is McDonalds mill near the Capitol This building is more like a cannery or a factory than a government warehouse upon entering en-tering it I found its walls unplasterod and great rows of tin cam packed in piles one on top of the other so that a hall as big as the average town council room was filled e with them Each of those cans was twenty inches long seven Inches high and threo inches wide There were 25000 of them In that room and they are made for the storing V stor-ing of these record cards for the use of tho I electrical counters While I was looking 1 at 8cm a terrible din was going on over I head It made me think of a boiler factory and I asked what was being done That said Mr Porter Uis where the cards are being numbered Each one of these sixtyfive million cards has to be numbered so that we can tell where it belongs be-longs There are only two big patent numbering num-bering machines in the United States and the owners of these wanted the job of numbering num-bering these cards They said that one man with a hand machine could number only three hundred cards a day and that it was impossible for the government to get along without their macbines They asked an exorbitant price and they thought we would have to pay it I tried the hand machines ma-chines and found that instead of three hundred hun-dred a smart workman could number thirty thousand and we have some who number fortytwo thousandaday The result re-sult is thatwe can number a millon and a half a day and we do it for a bagatelle compared com-pared with what the other men wanted But let us go up and see At this moment we stepped upon an elevator ele-vator of the kind you fina in the mills for tho raising of wheat and were pulled up to the second floor The din increased as we went up and the noise was that of a nail I factory when we stepped out About one hundred men sat at long rough tables all in their shirt sleeves and each having a heavy metal stamp in his hand Theso they brought down on the cards for all the world just like the postoffico clerks cancel the stamps on the letters sao that each stamp fell on a card and gave it a number and this numbering was consecutive and the cards were ready to be taken up to the census office for use SINE MILLION TALES OF WOE Taking a cab we next drove to the biggest big-gest chamber of sorrow in the United States Imagine a room about fifty feet long twenty feet wide and fifteen feet high and pack this with long tiers of shelving running in aisles through the centre of the room and reaching from the floor to the ceiling ceil-ing Make the walls of this room of iron vault it at the roof with fireproof cement fill these shelves with great packages of files so that they burst out into the aisles and let the files consist of thin slips of paper not much bigger than a postal card but each covered with notes and figures These are the records of all the mortgages of the United States The name of every man who has a mortgage debt is recorded on one of these files The date of his mortage is there the rate of interest he pays and in some cases the reason for which it was given There are nine millions of such records and it is safe to say that eight million mil-lion five hundred thousand of them keep the men who give the mortgages awake at night and worry them from day to day Each one of those slips could tell a utory of hope and misfortune Each one of them is full of pathos and the collection is the most remarkable that has been ever gotten together to-gether by a census or anything else When Mr Porter suggested it he was laughed at but the more Congress thought of his suggestion sug-gestion the more interested they became in it and the result is we have now a record of the personal indebtedness of the whole United States It took a small army of special agents to get it but these agents overhauled the records in every state and territory they traveled on horseback and on foot through the most sparsely settled parts of the country and the infoimation gained has been tabulated in such a way that you can get the exact number and amount of mortgages in the different states the rate of interest paid and the number of acres mortgaged When the reports are published this bureau will bring forth some very astonishing facts It will show for instance that nine per centof the lands in Iowa are mortgaged and that the farmers farm-ers pay from one to twenty percentfor the use of their money while in Alabama tho interest rate ranges as high as forty percent per-cent now THE TOWNS ARE GROWING I Tell met Mr Porter said I some of the most striking things y ou have discovered in your collection of tne census Well one replied Mr Porter is that the people are leaving the country and going go-ing to the cities and another is that our native American women are decreasing in numbers year by year as mothers of children child-ren The largest families in the United States and especially in New England are those in which the mothers are of foreign birth and I bqliove that the growth of cities has decreased the rate of increase in our population The birthrate in our cities is notoriously low and a tendency is to small families especially among the welltodo During the past ten years the cities have been growing at the expense of the country and in Massachusetts for instance fully seventy per centof the people live in cities In 1S2Q only one man in twenty lived in town and in 1790 twentynine people out of every thirty in the United States lived in the country and away from villages In I860 one man in six was living in the cities Tea years later one man in every five lived in the cities and now out of every ten men women and children in the Uuited States three of these are living in cities villages The change is astounding and the tendency seems to be increasing the city population right along There are a number of causes for it The people want life for their brains They like the society of their fellow men and the tendency of modern civilization is to combination The success that men who go from the country have in big commercial enterprises In manufactures and in public affairs of the city tempts their fellows to leave their farms and the result is as I have stated THE BOOMING WEST Where has been our greatest increase i during the last ten years In the west replied Mr Porter The Pacific states and territories grow very rapidly and the increase in the western states has been about sixty per cent The north Atlantic states have grown about nineteen per cent and the north central states about twentyeight per cent I believe be-lieve that the average percentage of increase in-crease is in round numbers about twenty five per cent and the country is growing right along We are giving a very full set of statistics this year of all matters relating to foreign immigration and we will show among other things that the numbers of Jews among us are increasing The persecutions perse-cutions in Russia have driven a great many Jews to this country and we are giving a better set of statistics regarding the American Amer-ican Jews than has over been received before be-fore Wo have reports from about 10000 families and 2 000 of these live in New York and Brooklyn There are about 4000 Jewish families in the eastern states and there are 2000 families living along thereat the-reat lakes I believe we will give better sources of information regardiucthe southern south-ern states than we have ever had before and we shall show that a number of these states are increasing rapidly in population In some of them the increase has been very small and in two of the northern states Maine and Vermont the population has boen stationary Florida has increased 44 per cent Arkansas 40 per cent and Texas 40 per cent Kansas has increased 42 percent per-cent Virginia 0 per cent and Kentucky 12 per cent New York has increased 17 per cent in tho last ten years and it has grown about as much proportionately as Iowa has and a little less proportionately than Georgia and Louisiana And so it goes over the whole Union We shall give the latest facts about all the states and we show that a number of the states have doubled in population Washington is five times as big as it was in 1SSO and Idaho has increased its population two and one half times I took down those fiures as Mr Porter gave them and we then went on to the InterOcean building where I found a thousand thou-sand and more men and women working away at tabulating machines and rattling at typewriters like so many patent corn shellers One room contained about fifty of these typewriters A young lady sat behind each and the typowriters were arranged ar-ranged in double file up and down the long room forming a very pretty picture I asked Mr Porter as to the work of the women as compared with that of the men He replied In the use of the tabulating machines and in counting they are far superior su-perior I had two women who were doing a certain class of work at 600 a year and I there were six men at the same work each 1 of which got S900 a year Upon investigation investiga-tion I found that tho two women accomplished accom-plished just as much ss the six menand that I was getting from them for 51200 just what cost me through the men 5400 I then increased tho number of women on that class of work with proportionate results re-sults FUANK G CARPENTER |
