Some of the illustrations of prepossession are somewhat trivial;
others more important, but perhaps not so definite as might be
desired. It is seldom that an instance of this propensity can be
pointed out in which an accurate and quantitative comparison may
be made between the possessed and the unpossessed mind. One such
illustration, which seems to me comprehensive and significant, is
worthy of more detailed record.[11] It is derived from the experience
of the United States Census office in 1890, in tabulating the returns
of the enumeration by means of machines specially devised for this
purpose. I give an account of the manipulation of these machines in
the words of one who had an intimate acquaintance with their use,
and add italics to emphasize the points of special psychological
significance.
"The adoption of Mr. Hollerith's tabulating machine for counting
the population of the country according, at one and the same time,
to sex, color, age, marital condition, nationality, occupation or
profession, language and school attendance presented an entirely
novel problem to the office. The machines having never been used
for any purpose, there was no previous experience by which to act
or on which to predicate results. The necessity was upon the office
of employing for a very limited time (ninety days) at least five
hundred people for this work alone, in addition to the one thousand
who could be taken from other branches of the work and placed on this
one. Every one, including Mr. Hollerith himself, felt that the rapid
and accurate use of the punching machines called for a degree of
cultivated intelligence not possessed by every clerk. So much for the
mental attitude.
"The clerks (an instructor for every twenty) were taught to edit
the family schedules from which the count was to be made, thus
learning thoroughly how to read and classify the returns. In order
to accommodate the returns to the capacity of a punching machine,
a great variety of symbols were adopted for occupations and
professions: thus Ad was used for farmer: Ac for farm hands: Kd for
merchants: Gd for agents, etc., through twenty-four two-columned
octavo pages of ordinary type. Some one symbol must be used for each
occupation recorded, and the use of the symbols must be learned, and,
for rapid work, they must be committed to memory.[12] _After five
weeks of editing_, one by one, the most reliable and intelligent
workers were set to use the punching machines. The task is much like
that of using a typewriter, substituting for keys a movable punch
which passes through lettered holes, and in place of the forty keys
of an ordinary typewriter, about two hundred and fifty holes are to
be learned.
"Mr. Hollerith set the number of cards for a day's work at 550.
(Each finished card contained, on the average, 10 holes.) _It was
two weeks before that number of cards was reached by any clerk_, and
that only in exceptional cases. Then the entire force of the division
was set to work. In two weeks most of them had reached five hundred,
and the average was daily increasing. These clerks worked at first
from edited schedules; that is, those on which had been written
the symbols to be punched on the machine. A roll of honor was made
out daily showing the highest records, and _in a week_ the clerks
were doing from _six hundred to fifteen hundred a day_, but at a
great cost of nervous force. So severe was the nervous strain that
complaints were made to the Secretary of the Interior, who forbade
any further posting of daily reports, and instead an order was posted
that no clerk was required to do more than such a day's work as he or
she could readily perform, and that no arbitrary number was required
of any one.
"_After the work was well under way about two hundred new clerks were
put into one room and scattered through the force already at work.
They had no experience with schedules, knew nothing of the symbols,
had never seen the machines. They saw those around them working
easily and rapidly, and in_ THREE DAYS SEVERAL OF THEM HAD DONE FIVE
HUNDRED, IN A WEEK NEARLY EVERY ONE, _while the general average was
rising_. There was no longer any question of nervous strain, and one
of these temporary clerks the day before she left beat the record by
doing 2,230. I think the influence of the mental attitude quite as
remarkable in the matter of their doing the work easily as in that of
doing it rapidly. During the first month many were actually sick from
overwork when doing seven hundred, while after that time the idea
that the work was unusually trying was never referred to. Another
significant fact is that after the posting of the daily record was
abolished there was no falling off in the daily average, as had been
anticipated, while complaints of overwork necessarily ceased."
It is thus demonstrated that an unskilled clerk, with an environment
proving the possibility of a task and suggesting its easy
accomplishment, can in _three days_ succeed in doing what a skilled
clerk, with a preliminary acquaintance of five weeks with the symbols
to be used, could do only after _two weeks'_ practice; and this
because the latter, doubtless not a whit inferior in ability, had
been led to regard his task as difficult.