WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF COLLATING PRINTED DOCUMENTS?

WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF COLLATING PRINTED DOCUMENTS?, written by Matt McDermott, Service Operations Manager of Discovery Office Systems

What would you do without a printer or copier to reproduce documents? Or, what would you do without the collating function when you have to make specific sets of manuals for an upcoming training session?

I would guess this question has never crossed your mind because for most of us printers and copiers and all their functions have always been part of our office equipment. At Kyocera Document Solutions, we make sure that these functions work correctly even when people don't know the history behind them.

Did you know that the mechanical printing history spans almost 1,000 years and that the world’s first movable type printing technology was developed in China in the 1040s? The example on the left is from a play printed in the Yuan Dyasty.

Then, in 1450, the German printer Johannes Gutenberg invented a movable type mechanical printing technology. It became known as the Gutenberg’s press and was the first to mass produce pages? A single Gutenberg printing press could produce 3,600 pages per work day. With so many pages hot off the press per day, the job of sorting them into books, collation, began in earnest, but it wasnt called that to start with.

The Beginning of Mechanical Collating Printed Documents

The term “collate” was first used in the 13th century and comes from the Latin “collatus” meaning “to bring together.” However, the first reference to collation in terms of sorting pages didn’t appear until 1628. At that time the process of collating was done by hand. Mechanical collation did not start until Herman Hollerith, an American statistician and inventor, developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards that rapidly tabulated statistics from millions of pieces of data in the late 1880s.

Hollerith went to work for the United States Census Bureau and helped them sort the 1890 census in only one year - the 1880 census tabulation took 8 years! In 1896 Hollerith started a company called the Tabulating Machine Company. He went on to invent the first automatic card-feed mechanism and the first keypunch. By 1911 Hollerith’s firm and 3 others merged to form what became the International Business Machines Corporation in 1924 under the presidency of Thomas J. Watson.

IBM President Tom Watson, Sr. ordered the development of a mechanical collation device because as he stated at the time: "the Social Security agency punched cards from records sent in by employers all over the country. There were millions and millions of them, and if we hadn't had some way of putting them together we would have been lost; we just couldn't have done it."

The Next Colation Invention

H.J. McDonald who had sold the IBM account to the Social Security Administration took up Watson’s challenge and came up with a machine he and John Bryce designed. The Social Security Administration began what was known as the “world’s biggest bookkeeping job” in a Baltimore brick loft building that had 120,000 square feet of floor space and was strong enough to bear the weight of 415 punching and accounting machines. A production line was set up to punch, sort, check and file half a million cards a day. The collator became a widely used device in government and business.

Modern collating machines

When electro photographic photocopiers were introduced by Xerox in the 1960s, keypunch card operators and collators soon became relics of another age. Today offices that don’t have major collation projects use a small collator printing feature consisting of a series of trays ordered by using a “collate” button on the device or print driver.

The next time you use the collating print function on your copier, think about the long way this machine and the collator have come.

If you have a good collation story or picture to share we would love to hear from you…