"Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate": A Cultural History of the Punch Card Steven Lubar One hundred years have passed since Herman Life and Casualty company used punch card Hollerith invented the punch card to tabulate the machines to compile mortality datastarting in 1910 1890ce nsus. That's also, almost exactly, the lifespan (Campbell-Kelly 144, Norberg). The machinery of the technology. Today, punch cards have found great favor with management. Using vanished from public view. The last few businesses language that we wouldn't be surprised to find in that still use punch cards are phasing them out, a modern-day report on computerization, one replacing punch card systems with computers, author wrote in 1926: optical scanners and magnetic storage media. But one aspect of the era of the punch card invaded the national subconscious to leave an ironic Punch card systems are a proved means of economically cultural legacy. The punch card era survives in the producing facts and figures vital to operating a railroad phrase "do not fold, spindle, or mutilate." The intelligently, from which business records can be quickly and phrase and the feelings it represents have outlasted accurately classified and presented to the executives at the time the technology, not to mention the billions of cards they arene ededin the form best suited to enable action. (Railway on which it was printed. Culture changes more Accounting !15!1-54) Punch card machines were modem and efficient­ slowly than technology. Symbols outlast machines. what we'd call today "high tech." It's easy to see The signified slides under the signifier. This cultural legacy is an important vestige how they came to symbolize all that was up to date of the punch card. Symbols are part reality and part and businesslike. mental image, and so they capture attitudes, feelings These early punch cards had no warning and beliefs-immaterial things sometimes hard to written on them. The cards Hollerith used for the find in the historic record. The phrase "do not fold, first automated census in 1890 were completely spindle or mutilate" has stuck so in our heads blank, unreadable except to machines. Either an because it captures a significant facet of American attempt to save money, or a piece of bravado, that; belief about automation, computerization and but Censusclerks soonlea rned to decipher the holes bureaucratic society. The history of the phrase can almost as quickly as the machines could (Austrian help to explain popular reaction to the computer­ 63). In only a few years cards had a variety of symbols ization of American society. on them, to indicate the meanings of the holes, but The federal government became the first major it was not until the 19-'0s that the first warnings user of punch cards when the Census Bureau used appeared. This is, as far as I can tell, exactly the them to tabulate the 1890 census. Hollerith's same time that the public began to see punch cards. machines soon found wide use in government The two events are, of course, related; the public offices. During World War I, for example, the army needed to be taught how to deal with the new used them to keep inventory and medical and technology. People had to learn to respec:t it, and psychological records, and the War Industries Board not to get in its way. did its accounting on the machines (Reid-Green, Among the earliest punch cards to "go public" Austrian, Cortata). were those used by New Deal agencies. New Dealers, Businesses also used punch cards. Starting familiar with the successful World War I experience about 1906, railroads replaced the complicated with using punch cards to coordinate the military systems of paperwork they used to track operating and the economy, put punch card machinery to use expenses, the location of rolling stock and goods in many social and economic programs. The first in shipment with punch card tabulating machines. "punch card checks" -among the first punch cards Insurance companies were not far behind: the Aetna to be distributed to the "end user," the man and This work was written by a US Federal Employee and as such is in the Public Domain woman in the street-were issued by the Agricul­ the canonical "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" tural Adjustment Administration in 1933. Social are lost in the mists of time. Security checks, issued starting in 1936, were also "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate." Folding punch cards, and before long, from World War II seems clear; you might fold a card to fit in an until just a short while ago, all federal checks­ envelope, or a pockeL But you're not supposed to some 600million in 1985-were punch cards (Figure crease these cards; that would jam the machine. l) (Bartlet 29, Beninger 409, Schwartz). The public's Punch cards aren't to be used in your ways, for first introduction to punch cards was in connection your purposes, but for those of the company that with the introduction of the biggest and best issued them. "Spindle" is the word that most publicized-and most controversial-new bureauc­ confuses people today. Spindling is an old filing racies. The technologywas still exotic, though. The system; a clerk would have a spindle, an upright New Yorker ran a story in 1940 about the crowds spike, on his or her desk, and would impale each that gathered in front of an office-supply store in piece of paper on it as he or she finished with it. Albany to watch punch card sorting machines in When the spindle was full, he'd run a piece of string action (Gibbs 54££). through the holes, tie up the bundle, and ship it Card punch technology became more wides­ off to the archives. (The custom still survives in pread in the 1940s. Libraries began to use punch some restaurants; the cashier spindles the bills as cards to keep track of books ("Automatic Book customers pay.) But you shouldn't spindle the cards: Charging," Waugh). Police departments used them they are part of someone else's system of paperwork, to track criminals. Their use in payroll and factory not your own; they demand special attention. management expanded. Newspapersand magazines ran popular articles on the technology. Almost all "Mutilate" is a lot stronger than the other of the description focused on the machines words. It expresses an angry intention on the part themselves, reporters outdoing one another with of the mutilator. From the viewpoint of the punch metaphors for the technology's utility. The card used, it suggests a fear: people might take out their frustrations on their punch cards. (Indeed, Saturday Evening Post referred to the Los Angeles Police Department's Hollerith machine as "a punch cards were mutilated. You could buy mechanical Sherlock Holmes," a "crime-hating machines advertised to "recondition mutilated robot," "The Detective Who Never Sleeps" punch cards" [Data Processing Annual 45].) Why (Monroe, Soraghan). The 1940 Census starred in would people mutilate punch cards? Punch cards were the interface between the public and the billing a Colliers Magazine article that called the punch card machine a "statistical sausage grinder," "the system. Metaphorically, they were where the public most amazing fortunetelling machines ever devised" meshed with the corporate world. They became (Scheinfeld). symbolic of the whole system. Earlier, it had been But it was in the 1950s, after the invention of the machines that were the focus of attention; in the computer and the beginning of its use in the 1960s the cards took center stage. business, that everyone began to see punch cards. Punch cards became not only a symbol for the Companies sent punch cards out with bills. computer (MacBride 24), but a symbol of alienation. Telephone companies, utility companies and They stood for abstraction, oversimplification and department stores realized that they could save a dehumanization. The cards were, it seemed, a two­ step in their billing process, as well as make it easier dimensional portrait of people, people abstracted for them to process the returned check, by using into numbers that machines could use. The cards the cards themselves as the bills (Data Processing came to represent a society where it seemed that Annual). By the 1960s, punch cards were familiar, machines had become more importantthan people, everyday objects. where people had to change their ways to suit the While company employees could be trusted, or machines. People weren't dealing with each other required, to take care of the cards, the person in face-to-face, but rather through the medium of the the street could not. Warnings were necessary. In punch card. All of the free-floating anxiety about the 1930s the University of Iowa used cards for technology, the information society, "Big Broth­ student registration; on each card was printed "Do erism," and automation attached itself to punch not fold or bend this card" (Baehne 32). Cards cards. Examining the metaphorical ways in which reproduced in an IBM sales brochure of the 1930s punch cards were used lets us understand some of read "Do not fold, tear, or mutilate this card" and the reaction and resistance to the brave new "Do not fold, tear or destroy" ("Modem Machine information world (Terbourgh, MacBride Chaps. Accounting" 4 and 6). The author and origin of 2 and 3, Gilbert 175-81, Michael). "Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate" Figure l. Social Security checks, starting with this first one in 1940, were punch cards. Courtesy U.S. Social Security Administration. The first place that "do not fold, spindle or Berkeley students were well aware of the mutilate" was taken off the punch card and standard 1960s notion that the United States had unpacked in all its metaphorical glory was the become an "organizational society." They believed, student protests at the University of California­ with most of the popular sociological writers of Berkeley in the mid-l 960s, what became known as the day, that "the shape and tone of our society, the "Free Speech Movement." The University of indeed the very way we think is dependent upon California administration used punch cardsfor class the products and information processed by large registration.