Engel's Counting Card
1871 · Individual Record Cards · Work 690 of 1,871
Many low stacks of individual record cards of 1871 laid out on a scrubbed wooden kitchen table in a tenement flat in Berlin in winter, the cards of thin pale cream cardboard, all of one size about twenty-one centimetres by fifteen, seen only as edges and stacks, two woman's hands in dark cotton sleeves lifting a card from one pile to another, beside them a sheet of pencilled tally strokes in bundles of five, soft in focus, a brass paraffin lamp burning above the table, on the bare floorboards an open crate of unpainted pine about eighty centimetres long with hemp rope handles, packed tight with upright cards, a black iron cooking range behind, warm lamplight from above.
- What it was used for
- The Zählkarte was the enumeration form of the Prussian census of 1871: a sturdy, slightly rough printed form the size of a paperback, one for each person. The head of household filled in one card for every member of his household in his own hand; the main section put eleven questions, with dotted lines for answers in complete words. The cards were collected, checked by the local authorities, and sorted and counted by hand in Berlin. Ernst Engel, director of the Royal Prussian Statistical Bureau, was one of the initiators of this census reform; he called official statistics a physics of society and compared it to an apparatus, a laboratory, a terrestrial observatory. Thirty million cards were needed, and 375 tons of paper for all the census's forms together.
- What was new
- What was new was the move from the list sheet to the mobile individual card. If every person sits on a sheet of their own, the stack can be reordered by any characteristic without copying anything out. What that meant in practice shows in the paper: all cards had to be made of exactly the same material, equally thick, equally smooth, equally heavy — durable enough for repeated handling, yet not so smooth that the cards slipped apart. In 1871, 39 firms submitted samples and bids, tested for strength, smoothness and weight and finally for ash residue; the contract allowed no more than 20 per cent ash. Printing took more than four months. The barb: after the count, most of the filled-in cards were sold as wastepaper to the paper industry.
What the sources leave open: The source does not say that Engel designed the card; it calls him director of the Bureau and a key initiator of the census reform. It does not list the eleven questions individually. The census date of 1871 was not verified and is therefore not stated here.