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FREEING THE OPERATOR
A N interesting example of the de-
/\ machinization of the count-
/ \ ing-house employe by machin-
/ % izing his work is furnished
by the money-order section
of the Chicago post office. Reckoned
by the number of individual accounts
handled, it is the largest counting
house in the world. Over 100,000
items a day are handled by this office
during the slack season, while, during
the Christmas rush, when the great
Chicago mail order houses receive
daily floods of money orders for their
Christmas sales, the number of individual
slips rises well above 200,000 a
day, yet you will find no plodding
human adding machines there.
Each money order, when it is received,
is sent to the punching sections.
Here girls, seated before small and un-
The OnlyHuman
Element
This girl may make
a mistake — she
rarely does, in fact
—but after t hecards
leave her
hands everything is
done by machinery.
There is absolutely
no chance for error.
704
lOQ^OOO
'MM •
- •
The Money Order Cards Look and Act Much Like
the Punched Music Rolls of a Pianola
impressive punch machines, with very
simple keyboards, translate the accounting
items of the money order into
punch holes on cards. These punch
cards are covered with figures in divisions,
the number punched out in each
division counting as one digit of the
figure.
The whole occupies but a few seconds,
and the card, which now looks
ike the pianola translation of something
which the advertisements urge
you to try on your piano, works on
exactly that principle. In stacks, the
cards are fed into huge accounting machines,
where the information corresponding
to the punch marks is typewritten
pneumatically, with carbon
copies, on loose leaf ledger pages.
The machines classify the cards,
tabulate the information in typewritten
columns, add up the amounts of money,
foot up the totals and carry them over
for the next page without effort and
without error.
John T. Hubbard, head of
A the money-order section at
the Chicago post office,
phrased the matter rather
accurately, when he remarked
: '
"Our. employes are not
machines but intelligent operators
of machines". And
this could well be taken as a
slogan by the heads of all
business corporations.