How did Charles Davies Sherborn do it?

[ChrisGreaves]

A recent article in The Telegraph "Charles Davies Sherborn, the Natural History Museum's 'magpie with a card-index mind’" states in part:-
Everything had to be done by Sherborn alone. It took three years just to put the million slips into rough alphabetical order.

Assuming 52 weeks in a year, 6 working days a week, 10 solid hours of lonely work per day, How did Charles Davies Sherborn do it?

My crude calculations - handling each slip only once in a linear fashion - yield 3 years; 1,000,000 slips; 333,333 slips/yr; 52 weeks/year; 6,410 slips/week; 6 days/week; 1,068 slips/day; 10 hours/day; 107 slips/hour - or about two per minute.

Easy to do during the first thousand or so, but a million slips, assuming each slip has the thickness of an envelope, (I have just measured a box of 500 white envelopes at one foot) would come to about 2,000 feet, roughly half a mile.

Of course, the slips would not be arranged linearly, but in at least a 2-dimensional array.
Still and all, there's bodily movement required after the first couple of thousand.

How did Charles Davies Sherborn do it?

[Jezza]

The important aspect of this work is that it was "roughly" sorted alphabetically and be it that Mr Sherborn was a expert in Taxonomy he would have no doubt known about Taxonomic Hierarchy in the classification of species.

Kingdom
    -Phylum
        -Subphylum
            -Class
                -Order
                    -Family
                        -Genus
                            -Species

I theorise that Mr Sherborn will have done his sorting as he went along sorting and ordering within each sub group of the hierarchy and that he appears only to gone down to sub groups to subphylum

Kingdom
    -Phylum
        -Subphylum

and as he was only within the Animalia Kingdom he "only" had to sort Phylum and subphylum

Am I on the right track?

[ChrisGreaves]

I theorise that Mr Sherborn will have done his sorting as he went along ... Am I on the right track?

Jezza, you've been on the wrong track for years, but as long as you run FAST you can still catch up (grin)


"It took three years just to put the million slips into rough alphabetical order." caught my eye.
That suggested to me that he took a 3-year break to sort paper slips, paper slips that weren't sorted.
The article doesn't say, one way or another, but I suspect that he just started cataloguing the first item that crossed his desk, did an article, dropped a slip into a shoe-box, and six weeks later started another shoe-box, ... and after several years said "Gee! I'd better sort this catalogue".
The article doesn't suggest any great degree of planning on his part.

I'd theorize that if the slips were in rough alphabetic order (say, 2000 slips per shoebox, yielding 500 shoeboxes, roughly 20 boxes per letter of the alphabet, so ShoeboxAA, Shoebox AB, ShoeboxAC etc.) that the sorting process couldn't have taken 3 years. (He didn't take time off to tie his tie nor, I assume, to wipe egg-stains of same tie).

The article suggested to me that he was confronted with a random sequence of slips.
I based my time estimates on picking up a slip and then having to use a random-access method to locate the showbox, then riffle through existing slips to find the correct slot.

I also guess that he was at the mercy of the collection: "You can't some in here today, we're waxing the floor", so that his sources of material would have been wildly random.