ROBOT CLERK.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 56, 7 March 1931, Page 11

ROBOT CLERK.

WORK ON CENSUS. LIVES SORTED BY MACHINE, EQUAL TO SCORE OF HANDS. When the Registrar-General of Britain conies to takle the titanic job of sifting out the mass of information whieh will be put at his disposal by the census in April, his staff of ordinary clerks will be supplemented by a corps of Robot, super-clerks. These machines, which modestly veil their qualities under tha prosaic "style of sorter-counter-printers, will sort out the details of the groups into which the census particulars are 'divided. Each machine can take three groups at a time, count the result, and print it on a card. There are 250- of them, and each is equal to the work of scores of clerks. It loves cards and can deal with 500 every few minutes. It is, moreover, exempt "from the fallibility which handicaps the human. The Robot cannot go wrong, and whilst it is an inexhaustible worker it is a mine of rare and curious knowledge. Would you know, for instance, how many chimney sweeps there are in WiganT The Robot will tell you. Are, you interested in the number of people who first saw the light in Poland and now get as much of it as the season j permits in salubrious Whiteehapel' The j Eobot has been impatient tc# let you i know. Indeed, in the words of a Govern- I ment official, "it can be used to supply any conceivable sort of information anybody could possibly want out of the census returns.^ The First Mechanical Sorter. Gone for ever are the laborious old days when all these statistics had to be got out by hand. The process of sorting out the details of private lives of the people by machinery began with the 1911 census, when the mechanical sorter was introduced. At the next census in 1921 the sortercounter machine came into operation, and the task of analysing the particulars was reduced considerably. Even then the Department was not satisfied, and the two British firms which specialise in the production of these superhuman machines were asked to go a step further. The result is the sorter-counter-printer. When the census papers reach the Registrar-General's Department the information is transferred to cards, containing the same subdivisions, by means of a machine, but the details are represented only by punched holes, and while incomprehensible t~ the uninitiated mind, are easily read by the officials whose duty it is to collate the general information supplied. Eveiry person in the land, from the youngest child to the centenarian, has a card of his own, containing his punched particulars. It is after this preliminary coding that the new Robot machine comes into operation to snli+ the particulars into ail manner of groups, such as ages, religions, professions and occupations, and children, for various official statistical purposes.

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