What was the labor shift involved when moving from the 1880 Census process to Hollerith's mechanized system?
Answer
Labor shifted from years of tedious arithmetic calculation to an intensive, shorter-duration data entry phase
While Hollerith’s machines handled the counting and tabulation, the initial step of reading the demographic information—the actual punching of holes into the standardized cards—remained a manual, human effort. Therefore, the nature of the labor changed rather than disappearing. The workforce was relieved of the multi-year burden of tedious, repetitive arithmetic calculations required to process the data after collection, shifting that effort into a concentrated, though intensive, period of data entry beforehand.
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