[Two men with automatic card sorting machine used for census taking]

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Two men stand beside a card sorting machine in this photograph, a piece of equipment that helped turn census counting into a mechanized task. Punched cards, each holding the answers from one household's census form, were fed into sorters that routed them into bins by a chosen category, so tallies that once took clerks weeks by hand could be assembled far faster. The caption card gives no date, but the tracings for machinery, automation and census point to the early twentieth century, when the Census Bureau adopted punched-card tabulation. The gallery board places it under automobiles, though the subject here is office machinery rather than vehicles.

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