Bringing Technology (and Geography) to the Census

This is a small portion of a scanned Popular Sciences magazine article from June, 1940 about that year's decennial Census.

The article is titled "Uncle Sam Counts Noses", and subtitled "How Amazing Machines Help Take Census." It is found on a neat blog called Modern Mechanix ("Yesterday's Tomorrow, Today") which presents "future"-ist articles from old magazines.

This article tracks the advanced machinery used by the Census Bureau to make the 1940 Census work:

Now begins the stupendous task of refining this mountain of data, and totting up the figures in some forty closely printed volumes of significant findings. Clerks doing it by hand would scarcely finish the job by the time for a new census. But ultramodern machinery—applying the punched-card system devised by Herman Hollerith, a former census man—has streamlined the undertaking.

There follows a brief explanation of how punch-card data management worked.

Among the photos used to illustrate the article was this small image of a pair of geographers with the caption:

Geographers mapping an enumeration district. There are some 143,000 of these areas, and careful planning guards against overlapping.

This is essentially the same task that many in the state and county GIS communities face over the next few years as we help make preparations for the 2010 Census and for the growing American Community Survey.