The multiplying punch in a life office

Extract

Punched-card machinery is in fairly common use in Life Offices and in the following paper I shall assume familiarity with the more usual machines, i.e. punches and verifiers, sorters and tabulators, together with ancillary machines such as reproducers, collators or interpolaters, and interpreters. For those who are not familiar with these machines several explanations have appeared already in print, a recent example being The development of the punched card method by K. J. Hedley, read before the Actuarial Society of Australasia in the latter part of 1946 and appearing in the Transactions of that body. The purpose of the present paper is to explain with some detailed examples of the method of application how the addition of a multiplying punch to a punched-card installation adds greatly to the power of that installation to perform calculations of certain types important to Life Offices, and how those calculations can be performed with great economy of manpower as compared with existing methods. I do not pretend to make an exhaustive survey of the uses of this remarkable machine.