JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

“This apparatus works unerringly as the mills of the gods, but beats them hollow as to speed”–Electrical Engineer, November 11, 1891

Many splendid displays of newly-manipulable data made their appearance in the Henry Gannet atlas to accompany the great U.S. census of 1890 –this example displays the composition of foreign born inhabitants of each of the states.  Part of this was due to the use of the Herman Hollerith tabulators, which made their appearance for the census office to work their electromechanical magic to process data faster than the 8-year-long process of the 1880 census. As it stands, the Gannet atlas and the census report was published beginning just two years after the completion of the 1890 census, a job made possible by the “mills of the gods” machine and some 48,000 enumerators (who completed returns for 13,000,000 households).  With prodigious thanks to Hollerith, the census was completed quickly and with a wider variety of data collection rather than what would have been the opposite without them.