Well you can knock me down

[austin_dern]

I didn't decide I needed new shoes lightly, because I'm incapable of making a decision lightly. But it's been a long time since I bought shoes, since I spent most of this decade living in a country where you can wear sandals year-round and not look too casual or chilly. Before that, I'd gotten a pair of Rockport-brand ... they're not really sneakers, I suppose, because they were made of the sort of durable heavy materials and I suspect leather that meant they withstood years of being squeezed around my huge, misshapen feet. I've got big feet and they're curled into neat little parentheses, far beyond the curve of every other person's feet on the planet. My mother says this is my fault for reliably escaping the corrective braces I had to wear as an infant; my suspicion is, if I was working that hard to get out of them they must have been agonizing. I'm too placid to make repeated efforts like that for perfectly trivial causes.

Despite the relatively large upfront cost Rockport shoes appealed to me because the old shoes stood up well: I remember before them having to buy new sneakers every year even though I spent sometimes as much as thirteen dollars on a pair. And neatly enough, the outlet malls nearby have a Rockport outlet store having a buy-two-get-one-free sale. This let me go looking not just for a pair that was as close as possible to the pair I meant to replace, except not crumpled by a decade or so of use and inter-continental shipping. They didn't have quite the same model, but they did have something very similar, with a bit more peach fuzz.

So then on to other shoes: I had no idea what to look for in other shoes. I briefly considered buying a new model of my dress shoes, which had in the years become more scuff than shoe, but I'd recently got a bottle of that liquid sponge-on shoe polish and that's restored them to quite respectable shape. So in a leap of imagination I went and got a pair that was the same basic shape as my dress shoes, only in white, as if I were going to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1957. And for the free shoe I went really wild: a black pair of what would pass for dress shoes, but which have none of this complicated shoelace thing, bringing the work-flow of sandals to a pair of shoes. How could I possibly resist?

Trivia: Shoe rationing -- to three pairs of shoes per year -- was put into effect in the United States in February 1943. In 1941 the average American bought 3.43 pairs of shoes. Source: Don't You Know There's A War On?, Richard Lingeman.

Currently Reading: Herman Hollerith, Forgotten Giant of Information Processing, Geoffrey D Austrian. If I'm lucky, the book will finally explain why Hollerith picked such a bizarro moon-man size for his punch cards instead of scaling them to some common everyday thing like the size of paper currency.

Comments

[orv.livejournal.com]

I'm quite fond of my Red Wing shoes. I got them back when I was still doing a lot of work on ladders and in odd corners of buildings, when having something with stiff soles and steel toes made sense. But even now that I'm in a job where I rarely have to face the possibility of dropping something heavy on my foot, I keep wearing them because they're so comfortable and durable.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I used to have a nice pair of steel-toed shoes which were basically required gear for the plant I worked a few summers (although I worked in the laboratory and so was never remotely in need of protective shoes). I don't know what's happened to them, but I thought it was really neat how I could stand on the toes and the shoes wouldn't buckle. You don't get that with shoes not made to survive factory equipment falling on them.

[orv.livejournal.com]

That's a good question about the cards. They're intriguingly close to the size of old pre-1928 "large" dollar bills, but off just enough (1/8 inch wider) to make that not quite convincing as an explanation.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/history.html hmm. Says they're the same measurement, but, no references cited.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Surprisingly, sources seem to like going without precise measurements, possibly because everyone has heard the story so long that it doesn't seem necessary to go back and double-check. Well, and you have to be in a museum, basically, to have access to the original late-1880s cards and dollar bills of the time. Either one is tough to wrangle, but both is really hard.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

It's not that hard to find the size of "Large Size" US notes, and the notes were the same size from 1861-1928. A standard supplies catalog states that a rigid holder for them has interior dimensions of 7 9/16 x 3 5/16. From reading the above-referenced article, the size of the cards has not changed, so any 80 column card should measure 7 3/8 x 3 1/4.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The thing is, sources aren't perfectly consistent. All right, maybe the large-size notes from 1861 to 1928 were designed to be 7 9/16 by 3 5/16 (or as Wikipedia mercifully puts it, about 189 by 79 mm). But Hollerith's original cards -- the ones printed from 1887 -- were 215 mm by 90 mm, which is noticeably larger in each dimension. The 1928-era IBM 80 column format cards went to 188 by 82 mm, which is nearly enough closer to fit, but that comes from forty years after the cards were first used, and is taller enough than dollar bills that it'd be obvious if you held the two together, and it could frustrate a holder.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Austrian, of course, does not give a citation for the mention of why the cards were given in its size (at least so far as I've read), apart from saying that the original, 1887, size was scaled to that of dollar bills so that they could be stored conveniently in compartments designed for dollar bills.

I haven't been able to figure out just when all paper currencies got standardized in size; remember that for a shockingly long while pretty much anyone who wanted to could call themselves a bank and print up their own paper dollars. I'm not sure how close things may have standardized to the ideal United States Pre-Federal-Reserve Note.

However, the declaration that the important scaling factor was that they fit conveniently in dollar bill compartments loosens up the size requirements: any dollar bill compartment is going to have a fair bit of leeway, first so people can fit their fingers inside to pull out a bill and second because bills are going to get crumpled and folded and dislodged. But the Hollerith cards would be by design stiffer stock and not folded or mutilated: they wouldn't need quite so much leeway or spacing for people pulling a batch out of storage. And there's the natural desire to have the cards be wider so that there's more room to punch, so that seems at least a workable hypothesis, that just not being too big for the slots or boxes or storage compartments was the critical need, and there wasn't the need to fit too exactly.

[orv.livejournal.com]

True. So maybe there is something to that, after all.

One web site I ran across claimed that the size was chosen so that, while doing the Census, they could use boxes from the Treasury Department designed to hold currency. It's an intriguing idea.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The Census -- specifically, the United States Census -- was definitely Hollerith's target initial market (soon after came the Austrian and Canadian censuses). Actually, the lead I'd like to pursue now is that as the book makes clear, Hollerith did not invent or claim to invent the idea of punched cards for carrying information (and they can be traced back to Jacquard looms, of course). I'm curious what the cards used between the looms and the census machines looked like.

[orv.livejournal.com]

It actually took me a while to realize that most punched-card applications, at least up through the 1950s, had nothing to do with general-purpose computers -- they were simple sort-and-tabulate problems.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's one of the tough things about reading this biography -- stepping down ideas of what all this information processing is. The work amounted to coming up with all the ways they could count how many people fell into pairs or trios of categories.

You probably heard this already, though, but quite a few people were outraged that the 1890 census revealed the population of the United States was far short of the 75 million that, apparently, the Republic was entitled to.