The Journal of Jonathon Lindey From the main part of the journal - Page 2
I soon settled into a routine. In the morning I would leave my rooms and walk to my office in the Bureau, purchasing a newspaper on the way. On reaching the office I would read the newspaper while my clerk assembled the results of the previous day's processing for me to scrutinise. If there had been any problems with the machines usually I would go and take a look. Sometimes I would assist Mr Hollerith in making repairs. Otherwise I would take the results and look them over. It was my habit to take small sections of the data and check the computations by hand, but I also looked over the data as a whole to see if any inconsistencies stood out from the general pattern. The brain God gave us is a marvellous pattern matching device. Oft times we can see flaws in a pattern long before we can work out what it is that is wrong with the pattern. One bright spring day - I remember it well - I spotted just such an anomaly in the data from the machines. We were processing data from New England and had just finished Massachusetts. We were in the process of starting on Rhode Island. I should, perhaps, explain that at the time we were comparing the new data with that of the previous census to look at patterns of growth and decline in different areas. This information was needed to plan future provision of services in growing areas. I was looking at the data for the town of Crystal Falls on the Massachusetts/Rhode Island border when I was struck by the fact that the figures for town were identical with those of the previous census. Now it isn't unusual for a town to have a 'stable' population, but usually it means (in the case of a small town like Crystal Falls) that the population varies by a dozen or so around a median figure. It is even possible, given enough towns, for the population of one of those towns to have exactly the same population at two consecutive census times, but this would be unusual. Crystal Falls, though, went far beyond a mere equal number of residents - it had the same number of men, the same number of women, and the same number of children under ten. It was as though the town had been frozen in time during the ten years since the previous census. My first thought was that someone had somehow used the forms from the previous census to enter the data into the tabulating machines. I arranged to have the forms for the area brought up to my office and checked them against the data. They had all been entered correctly. Baffling. |
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