Nightingale died 10 years after the twentieth century began, on the verge of a modern era that her innovations had helped to make possible. The changes the new century brought would be tremendous. The twentieth century not only opened up an impressive consolidation of the mathematical theory of statistics—above all, in probability theory—but it also totally transformed the amounts and kinds of numerical information available in virtually every area of human endeavor.
This previously unimaginable expansion of numerical information brought with it an increasingly urgent need for relieving the burden of repetitive arithmetical calculations. People had been looking for ways to make such calculations less burdensome since as early as the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of machines were invented and constructed that performed the four simple arithmetic operations. Of these the Difference Engine and the Analytic Engine of Charles Babbage (1791–1871) are the most interesting.
As we saw in the last chapter, a modified version of Babbage’s Difference Engine was constructed and put to use in computing and printing out William Farr’s English Life Tables (1864). The Analytic Engine, on the other hand, was even more sophisticated, designed to have many features that we associate with today’s computers. Sadly, no working model was ever actually built.
Cover of 1890 Scientific American showing women census clerks handling the cards used by the Hollerith tabulating machines. Courtesy of Widener Library of Harvard University
Yet, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, new means of mechanical calculation did make it possibly not only to calculate very large amounts of numerical information but also to tabulate impressive new kinds of data.
For example, the tabulation and correlation of the U.S. census of 1890—done 10 years before the death of Florence Nightingale—was performed by what were then and later known as “punch cards.” (See figure on previous page.)
Herman Hollerith, a mining engineer, devised a system of punched cards to process the 1890 census. Holes punched at specific places on the cards represented the data. Electric contacts could meet through the holes, and by this means the holes could be counted.
Although the minimum data required for determining representation in Congress were not necessarily changed from earlier censuses, the census of 1890 generated and correlated social data of a kind never envisioned by the authors of the Constitution. The published report covers such diverse topics as school attendance, drains, cemeteries, paupers and the insane, cotton production, whaling boats and vessels owned in Boston, and the salaries and uniforms of the police of Austin, Texas.
Hollerith founded a company to exploit this technology, which later merged with two companies to form the present IBM (International Business Machines). Punched cards were later known as “IBM cards,” and the history of the computer, as we now understand it, was well under way.
The rise of numbers had carried the world to the brink of a new “digital” age of information.