ROBOT MACHINES.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20543, 19 February 1935, Page 5

ROBOT MACHINES.

Tabulation of Information About Australians. CARDS OF CENSUS. {Special to the “ Star.”) MELBOURNE, February 12. Cards that tell the life history of each Australian citizen 'are being stacked away in millions at Canberra. They are covered with graph-like perforations, and although these markings are'meaningless to the layman they are easily decoded by officials. The cards are'the basis of the 1933 census. Tabulations of the returns will not be completed until five years after the actual enumeration, so that the census staff still has about three years’ work before it. The final cost of the census will be about £300,000. A staff of 140 is still employed in this work, but of the original 250 clerks engaged by examination, only eighty-five are left. The rest of the tabulating and mechanical work is done by girls and lads. A feature of the last census, revealed by study of the papers, has been the conscientious response by the Australian people to the obligation to answer the questions placed before them. There is one notable exception—the question relating to religion. On this occasion the people were informed that they were under no legal obligation to state their religion, and about 15 per cent availed themselves of the right to decline to do so. The work of tabulation is carried out by strange machines, which are hired from England, and will be returned when the work is finished. There are nine giant tabulating machines and sixty punching machines, and these, fed by the nimble fingers of girl attendants, sort out the characteristics of millions of Australians with robot-like intelligence. There is a personal card for each of the G. 600,000 Australians in existence when the census was taken. These are put through the machines at the rate of four millions a w T eek, and each

has to go through the machines about 100 times. The information given by the public on the census papers are coded into numbers, which are printed on cards. The punching machines perforate these cards alongside the printed number in accordance with the particular answer on the census paper. When completed the card is perforated with holes in a graph-like design. They are then put through the tabulating machine, which sorts out and counts the perfora#ons. Each perforation means the name, age, religion, nationality and so on, of each individual. They are Greek to a stranger, but a census official can read them just as the musician reads the score of a song. Finally the code is translated back into the original classification, and the information is there ready for the printer. Uncanny Speed. The original census papers are not used. The cards are the sources of information and they are completely impersonal, no name appearing on them. The dwelling classification is at present being analysed by these machines, which work w r ith uncanny speed and accuracy. There are one and a half million dwelling places in Australia and a card for each. Detailed information, such as rent and number of rooms, is punched on these «rds for tabulation later.