As you can see, that feed knife moves so rapidly and the endless band
fingers carry the cards out of the way in such a hurry that they move
along in a steady stream. We have only twenty of these machines and they
handle all the cards."
"It's hard to believe," said Hamilton wonderingly, "that these machines
don't think."
"We're just building one in here," the supervisor replied, leading the
way into a little partitioned-off section of the room, "that has an
uncanny ingenuity. This machine feeds itself with cards, verifies and
tabulates at an incredible speed. It took some time to perfect all the
adjustments, but it is running finely now, and it will simplify the work
of the next census amazingly, just as the machines you saw have made the
old hand punching machines of former times seem very cumbersome. But
this one," he added, "is a gem."
[Illustration: PIN-BOX AND MERCURY CUPS. Details of mechanism which
almost magically detects mistakes in any census card. (_Courtesy of the
Bureau of the Census._)]
"It's a little like magic, it seems to me," said Hamilton, "to think of
every person in this whole country being registered on a card with a lot
of little holes in it, and practically the whole history on it.
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