The invention that fueled today’s information revolution: the punched card
BY:
Eric De Grasse
Chief Technology Officer
PROJECT COUNSEL MEDIA
“Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945”
Author: Lars Heide
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Date: 2009
7 September 2022 – Every summer during our late August, early September break the whole Project Counsel Media team tries to catch up on a range of books, PDFs, recorded webinars and podcasts that did not have time for. My catch-up list tends to swerve toward technology. Here is one book I found intriguing (you’ll find a link to the PDF below). Here are some bits and pieces pulled from the introduction and first chapter:
At a time when Internet use is closely tracked and social networking sites supply data for targeted advertising, Lars Heide presents the first academic study of the invention that fueled today’s information revolution: the punched card. Early punched cards helped to process the United States census in 1890. They soon proved useful in calculating invoices and issuing pay slips.
As demand for more sophisticated systems and reading machines increased in both the United States and Europe, punched cards served ever-larger data-processing purposes. Insurance companies, public utilities, businesses, and governments all used them to keep detailed records of their customers, competitors, employees, citizens, and enemies.
The United States used punched-card registers in the late 1930s to pay roughly 21 million Americans their Social Security pensions, Vichy France used similar technologies in an attempt to mobilize an army against the occupying German forces, and the Germans in 1941 developed several punched-card registers to make the war effort—and surveillance of minorities—more effective.
Heide’s analysis of these three major punched-card systems, as well as the impact of the invention on Great Britain, illustrates how different cultures collected personal and financial data and how they adapted to new technologies.
In the 1930s and 1940s, three large-scale registers of citizens that relied on punched cards were initiated in the United States, France, and Germany, demonstrating that industrial nations—whether democracies, autocratic states, or dictatorships—found use for and began to establish huge administrative systems from the 1930s onward. Punched cards, also known as punch cards, were the first technology to facilitate large, machine-readable registers that improved the abilities of the nation states to locate and control their individual inhabitants, for better and for worse. In the United States, the Great Depression had caused severe social problems. Twelve million Americans had lost their basis for existence, as their jobs had vanished or their farmsteads had been ruined. “Social justice through social action” was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaign promises in 1932.
A major component of Roosevelt’s policy of social action was the Social Security Act of 1935. This provided income for the elderly in the form of a pension, a program for unemployment compensation funds, and federally funded relief to the blind and to dependent children. As of 1937, twenty-one million citizens were entitled to an old age pension that was financed through compulsory payments from their employers. The salaries and wages paid were recorded under each employee’s name by the Social Security administration in Baltimore, Maryland, so that their pensions could be calculated, an operation that was depicted by a contemporary newspaper as “the world’s biggest bookkeeping job.”
You can download the book for free by clicking here.
