Uncle Sam Counts Noses
HOW AMAZING MACHINES HELP TAKE THE CENSUS
LAST month the census taker came to call. He unfolded a big white sheet of paper and began firing questions. Name? Age? Birthplace? And so on until he knew all the answers, and departed with his pencil-checked list. All over the country, 120,000 fact finders were doing the same. So far as foresight in planning could provide, they overlooked no dwelling’s occupants; they even visited auto trailers, marking them with stickers to avoid recounting!
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The census department had some serious technical chops in 1950. Census workers were given maps and aerial photos of their districts so they could find all of the residences. The punch card counting machines seem pretty advanced as well with data validation circuits that would reject, for example, a two year old with six kids. I wonder how many kids they considered it alright for a two year old to have?
COUNT OFF, AMERICANS…
By Richard F. Dempewolff
For A house-to-house canvass that will make all the brush salesmen in the world look like an army of pikers, wait until you see the one that gets under way April first. Yup, it’s time for the 1950 decennial census, Uncle Sam’s national inventory of noses—the biggest quiz show, most mammoth tabulating phenomenon and most accurate poll in history.
It’s a job that has taxed the ingenuity of a harried Census Bureau every zero year since 1790. At that time 17 U. S. marshals and 600 assistants knocked on colonial doors, asked five questions of whoever answered, then tacked their lists on the walls of local taverns, so that people who’d been skipped could add their names or Xs when they dropped by for a flagon of ale. Results were mailed to the President.
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