History

Innovations

Early Tabulating Machine.
Photo courtesy of the National Archives Collecting and reporting the data from the decennial census has brought about and furthered advances in science, technology, and statistics. To help summarize the growing number of census returns, hand-operated tallying machines were first introduced in the 1870 census.

The growing processing problems seen in the 1880 and 1890 censuses led directly to the development of the punch card and an electric tabulating machine by Herman Hollerith, an employee of the 1880 census. This revolutionary means of coding and tallying information was used to process the 1890 census. Hollerith's venture later became part of what is now the IBM Corporation.

Statistical sampling on some census questions was first introduced in 1940 and has increased with censuses thereafter. The Census Bureau used the first commercial electronic computer, UNIVAC, to compile some of the statistics from the 1950 census. To gather information more efficiently, the census-by-mail and self-enumeration (a household completing a census form on its own without an enumerator's assistance) were first used in the 1960 census.

Dealing with ever-increasing processing complexities, Census Bureau employees created another revolutionary machine known as FOSDIC (Film Optical Sensing Device for Input to Computers) for use in tabulating the 1960 census. After high-speed cameras microfilmed census questionnaires, FOSDIC reads the "fill-in-the-dot" answers directly onto computer tape.

To enhance accuracy in collecting and tabulating census information, the Census Bureau created a new digital mapping and geographic referencing system known as TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing). Computer-assisted interviewing was introduced in the early 1990s and the Internet is revolutionizing the way in which information is collected and disseminated in the 21st century.