A Desire to Know More
The sample lines, the special machine to read them, and all of the efforts bent on getting them read stemmed from the desire of government planners and other data users to know more about the nation and its people. All the questions on each sheet had been suggested, amended, and selected by the Director of the Census with advice from bureau staff and “advisory committees of experts.” Because Congress and other data users required more information than the bureau could ask of everyone on a single sheet of paper, the census in 1950 employed (for only the second time) statistical sampling, cheating the limits of the census system. Later on, after people on sample rows had been asked more questions and their cards had been punched with the help of the Richards copyholder, probabilistic reasoning would allow bureau officials to translate this twenty percent sample into an accurate estimate of how the entire nation would have responded.
These technologies — paper forms that distribute and coordinate labor, devices that guide the reading of a form, or probabilistic sampling — are not the most famous data innovations commonly associated with the 1950 census. That honor belongs to UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer). The Census Bureau became the first civilian client to purchase the groundbreaking electronic digital computer, which it used to generate some of the final tables of statistics for 1950. Up until that point, electronic computing had been limited to military uses and sponsors. The machine cost the bureau $701,000 to purchase and install, a sum that grew to about $1.25 million when one includes the costs of making the office space suitable for the room-sized device by installing air conditioning and a backup power supply. The Census Bureau had earlier played a leading role as the patron for paper card tabulation in the 1880s, helping to bring about a new era in data-processing. In 1950, some thought the UNIVAC would eventually bring its own revolution: “Information which requires several runs through punched card equipment can be obtained from the Univac in one run,” explained the procedural history. It continued, looking forward: “With machines like the Univac, future censuses should be processed with considerably greater speed.”
The allure of charismatic computing technologies can distract us from the rest of the data-gathering system. These census records, by contrast, draw us back to the bigger picture. They remind us that the data we rely on to govern, advocate, or plan (whether we’re in government, business, academia, or elsewhere) result from a massive cooperative effort.