Ellsworth Huntington, Punch Cards, and Climate and Mortality Research in the Early 1920s

The early 20th-century American geographer Ellsworth Huntington is well-known for his work on climatic determinism, eugenics and in writing popular geographical textbooks (Fleming, 1998). Huntington’s work sought causal explanation for the patterns of civilization and mortality across the globe, in particular focusing on climatic, cultural and hereditary factors. His compilations of vast swathes of data were often crude and led to generalised claims that were subsequently widely critiqued. In research on climate and mortality in New York City, however, Huntington worked with prominent experts in American life assurance and with their latest technologies (namely punch cards, sorting machines and tabulators), to analyse late 19th century data and propose causation between particular climatic conditions and death rates. Indeed, this work was pioneering in its use of such equipment at that time and in the working relationship developed between insurers and climatologists. These technologies, however, also shaped this work in at least three ways: through the limiting cost of the equipment and labour, the style and structure of the standard Hollerith punch card, and the typical practices of clerks in the life assurance companies. Drawing on archival fieldwork at Yale University with the extensive early 1920s correspondence between Huntington and notables like Arthur Hunter (actuary, New York Life) and Louis Dublin (statistician, Metropolitan Life), the paper contributes to discussions of materiality in the history of the atmospheric sciences. Through narrating this example, the paper re-asserts the importance of understanding how climatological research is produced through the socio-materialities of technological and institutional systems.