The Actuary's Deck

1935 · Mortality Tabulation · Work 589 of 1,871

The Actuary's Deck, 1935, Mortality Tabulation

A card tray with a plain paper label on its end, the cards within divided by plain guide tabs at even intervals, cards with one corner cut ruled into columns with the digits 0 to 9 printed down each column and rectangular holes punched in a scattered pattern, a worn ledger open beside the tray on the desk, its pages showing ruled tables of figures as a fine grey texture, the tray and its tabs close to the lens, an insurance office desk in dark wood under a green-shaded desk lamp, the office behind in soft focus.

What it was used for
The actuary's deck was a life insurer's file: one punched card for each policy or item, from which reserves, premiums and loans were computed. What that looked like in practice can be read in the state insurance examiners' reports printed by the trade journal Best's. One such report of 1933, on the fraternal Lutheran Mutual Aid Society, states that in making the valuation the Hollerith reserve cards were grouped by year, plan, and age at issue; in the report on Missouri State Life the examiners recalculated practically all the net policy reserves from the Hollerith valuation card files. A report of 1935 notes that the uncollected and deferred premium records were maintained on Hollerith tabulating machinery and reconciled with the accounting department weekly, with both net and gross premium figures punched on the cards; policy loans were listed by Hollerith machines and reconciled to the ledger account.
What was new
What was new was less a machine than a role: life insurers were not followers but drivers. JoAnne Yates shows that they were among the very first commercial adopters, because single firms already held over a million policies in force, policies that often stayed in force for decades. In 1895 an actuary for Prudential invented the Gore sorter, which Yates says improved on any sorting technology Hollerith had to offer at that point; in 1901 the Actuarial Society of America chose that sorter over Hollerith equipment, and a few months after this rebuff Hollerith introduced his own sorting device. The 1933 examiners worked from the card file itself, and the report on the Lutheran Mutual Aid Society records that a few errors were found on the cards and corrected.

What the sources leave open: No documented 1930s figures for a named insurer (policies, cards, machines, staff) were found. The Best's examination reports do name the companies examined: in 1933 the Lutheran Mutual Aid Society and Missouri State Life, in 1935 Federal Life. The only solid run of Metropolitan Life figures found dates from about 1954 to 1957 and is therefore not used here.

Further reading