Heide 2009
Heide, Lars. Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880-1945. Baltimore: JHU Press, 2009.
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The traditional American office before the Civil War was staffed by male clerks, who wrote everything by hand in pen and ink. Their work was done in bound volumes, like account ledgers, copy books of outgoing letters, and minutes of the board of directors’ meetings, when the com- pany became incorporated and a board was appointed. Bound volumes had the advantage of keeping things together, and they prevented fraud. Incoming letters were loose leaf, which was considered a problem. Some companies bound incoming letters, others kept brief records in bound letter journals, while a third answer was just to keep the loose-leaf letters stitched on strings or as a stack in a drawer or a box. Vertical filing systems were marketed for this purpose around 1900, and accu-
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rate filing was ensured by trusted clerks and through records in bound volumes.
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…a large proportion of the workers in the new-style offices were assigned narrow duties involving routine work, like typing, punching, or shorthand, based on training in these fields. Female office workers were often employed in this kind of routine job, and most of them remained in such positions. Routinization, formal hierarchies, and office machines became crucial components in the organization of big offices.
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Remington of Ilion, New York, started to produce typewriters in 1874. Their success encouraged competitors to enter the market, so that by 1890 thirty typewriter producers existed in the United States, growing to eighty-five producers by 1910.
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…the first reliable keyboard adding machines started to be produced in the United States by Dorr E. Felt and William S. Burroughs in the 1880s. In 1887, Felt began to market his nonprinting adding machine, in which the total was displayed on a visible result register…
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…in 1887, he added what became his adding machines’ outstanding accomplishment: printing the numbers as they were entered and the totals. 6A printout enabled the operator to check an addi- tion much more easily; previously operators had had to repeat their cal- culation until they got the same result twice.
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By 1900, separate typewriter and adding machine industries had emerged, each based on a machine stabilized in one or a few versions, and each market segment was highly competitive.
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Three years later, Burroughs launched a machine that could print identification numbers and dates in addition to the figures posted, enabling a bank, for example, to print the account number for each entry. Both machines had a wide carriage that allowed the use of wide sheets or forms. This eased the use of adding machine prints as pages in loose-leaf l…
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The integration of typewriters and adding machines emerged in several variants. One type consisted of invoicing machines based on combinations of typewriters and adding machines, for example the Ellis adding-type- writer and the Moon-Hopkins billing machine. They were complex designs and slow to use, as the operator had to type the full name and address for every invoice. The design of the Ellis adding-typewriter was finalized in 1906 and subsequently produced. Production of the Moon-Hopkins bill- ing machine started in 1908. 12An alternative was to use a set of separate machines to calculate, issue, and address invoices. For example, addressing could be performed by use of an addressograph, but then the alphabetic capability was only used for writing invoice specifications. Further, it was necessary to perform multiplications either by hand or by use of a separate multiplication machine.
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In the decade after 1905, three challengers to Hollerith emerged: the Census Bureau machine shop, John Royden Peirce’s punched-card systems, and the Powers Accounting Machine Company.
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Compared with the key-set bookkeeping machines built during the next couple of decades, the core advantage of the punched card was the need for only one data entry for several jobs. The cost of attaining this was higher standardization requirements and more rigorous organization.
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For the first time, a tabulator could print the result on paper.
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A programmable and printing tabulator proved hard to build. The ability to print and program was essential to attract bookkeeping jobs, as several tabulator settings were needed in a bookkeeping installation. Pow- ers’ first tabulator was a prototype that was based on the technology of the printing Felt and Tarrant adding machines, which greatly eased his work, but he never was able to make these machines reliable.
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The Powers tabulator’s ability to print was a requisite for most book- keeping tasks. Also, printing became a useful capability of actuarial sta- tistics, which was the reason the Actuarial Society of the United States chose Powers equipment for their big mortality investigation, which was processed from 1916 to 1918.52
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Punched cards did not always have the best quality. They could hold electric conductive particles, metal, or carbon grains, which became false holes in electric reading. Small cracks or fallen out bits could cause false reading for both kinds of machines, but the conductive particles only caused problems on electromechanical machines.
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The major advantage of punched-card-based printing was the auto- matic execution, but in advance of being printed, all cards had to be packed in a deck of cards. Further, the paper applied was advanced by rubber rollers, which had limited precision.
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Soon, he engaged his own team of engineers, first and foremost William Walter Lasker, who brought expertise in typewriter design.
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This was the first successful printing tabulator that both listed information from punched cards on a sheet or paper roll and printed totals. The operation of the machine, either listing all cards or printing the totals, was selected by shifting a switch.
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Numeric printing had been the Powers company’s original competitive advantage, but only in 1919 did it attain a full set of reliable punch, sorter, and tabulator machines to make the best of this advantage—which they then lost two years later when the Tabulating Machine Company intro- duced their numeric printing tabulator.
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First, the Powers Accounting Machine Company worked to develop bookkeeping applica- tions requiring letter printing in 1924.
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Punched-card-based letter printing was first marketed by the British Powers company in 1921. However, this feature could only manage a reduced alphabet, and letter printing was restricted to separate printing positions, which could not print numbers. The British Powers company developed this feature at the instigation of the Prudential Insurance Com- pany in London that wanted names as well as amounts to be represented in the perforated cards.
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As early as 1916, the British Powers company filed a patent applica- tion on letter printing, but at the same time the American company refused to adopt this facility. The American company first embraced alphabetic printing in 1924. Lasker implemented the British design by developing a new tabulator that could print letters and numbers in sepa- rate printing positions like the British model.
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The first American alphabetic printing tabulator was installed in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York in 1925.
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In 1925, the Powers company’s system with a reduced alphabet was the only other punched-card system with letters available in the United States. However its success was very limited, and Remington Rand chose not to implement it on the 90-column punched card, when it introduced this card as its standard between 1929 and 1935. This history indicated that the Powers company and Remington Rand perceived a very weak demand for letter printing until the mid-1930s.
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It was planned to use punched cards in issuing customer statements, as opposed to address plates that were usually used for this purpose in the Remington Rand applications at that time. The addresses were to be pro- duced by use of the reduced Remington Rand alphabet with twenty-three letters and three cards for every address, each corresponding to one of the lines: name, street number and name, and city and state. This application was to be based on the old 45-column card, as the new 90-column card could not yet hold letters. This project was never implemented, and Rem- ington Rand did not pursue a comparable integrated system until the end
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of the Second World War. Mistakes due to technical imperfections were highly probable, but Remington Rand’s subsequent nonpursuance of this promising application indicates a lack of demand rather than technical difficulties.
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Though the new Remington Rand card had capacity to become alphanumeric, the first new machines only served the double-deck card with numeric representation.The American Powers system of reduced alphabet representation from 1924 had not been a sufficient success to be included into Remington Rand’s new line of machines. However, it was possible to use a part of a punched card for letters to be printed, by using the old standard 45-column positions, and the rest of the card for the numeric double-deck standard.
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The difficulties of visual reading of the numeric double-deck standard, distinguished it from the old numeric 45-column standard. To alleviate this problem, Remington Rand produced an “interpreter” that printed the meaning of the punched holes on the card.
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For all the applications considered by Peirce, the card was the original form that recorded the transaction. This shows that Peirce saw punched cards in a different role than his competitors did. He was the first to realize that a punched card could contain the original entry.
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Already during the negotia- tions in 1913, Peirce had proposed a system based on a “master card” on every policy that held punched information of the policyholder’s name and address along with the relevant numerical information indicating
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amount insured, amount to be paid, date of payment, and other relevant information. The punched information was also to be printed on the card, which would be used to generate invoices, receipts, and other transaction documents.
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The master card revived Peirce’s original vision of punched-card systems with letters, but no one had any experience using letter codes in punched cards in 1913. A suitable code was needed, together with a punched card holding sufficient information.
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Further, Peirce proposed preparing various internal records, including a register of policies issued and an agent’s list of notices. The planned alphanumeric punch was a modernized version of his punch design from 1907 and resembled a typewriter.
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By 1922, this system included a prototype tabulator that implemented the first alphanumeric representation in punched cards, needed for address- ing letters to policyholders.
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In contrast to the two other challengers, John Royden Peirce was a visionary and from the outset worked for punched-card-based bookkeep- ing and alphanumeric systems to gain access to business of much greater volume. By doing this, he opened a renegotiation of the very nature and purpose of punched cards and which abilities punched-card technology should have. However, Peirce ran into problems caused by his inability to implement his ideas and designs and to produce reliable machines…
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