An officer of the U.S. Public Health Service administers an intelligence test; the caption from 1915 describes the test subject as a “mentally defective immigrant woman” who was performing the “cube test” apparently not well as she had “but little success, having failed in three out of four trials.” If she failed because of performance anxiety—probably not surprising given the new and bewildering surroundings immigrants found themselves in (and being asked to perform strange tasks)—the author does point out that “allowance must always be made for fear and mental stress under which the subject may be laboring, and two or more separate examinations on different days may be necessary.”..
Cube test. The subject was supposed to follow the sequence of cube taps made by the examiner; the sequence became progressively more difficult. A four-year-old child was supposed to be able to repeat the first line of the test...
Feature profile test. One challenge was how to construct intelligence tests that would transcend barriers of language. This test was one of them. It was described as a test that a six-year-old could complete “with very few mistakes.”..
Imagination is important too. Our original caption says: “The inkblot imagination tests. The subject is asked about each blot, ‘What does this look like and what does it remind you of ?’ The answers given should be logical and sensible, and it would not be so to call ‘1’ a tree or a star, but it would be quite reasonable to call it a snake, a river, or a pennant, and it would also be well within the realm of sense to call ‘2’ a bear, ‘5’ a house or a hat, and ‘6’ a butterfly or an umbrella...
Immigrants coming to the New World from Europe had to run a gauntlet of tests at Ellis Island, the main federal immigration station in the U.S. from 1892 to 1954. In charge of the tests were the officers and men of the U.S. Public Health Service.
If incoming ships showed no sign of endemic disease, they were allowed to land. Medical tests for individuals began as soon as they hefted their luggage up the stairs to the registry room: those who arrived huffing and puffing were pulled aside for further health checks. Diseases such as trachoma (an eye disease that is now rare) or other ailments considered back then to be serious and incurable would be sent back to their port of origin right away; those who were ill might have to wait until they were healthy to be admitted to the country.
The immigrants were interviewed to weed out political and social undesirables: communists, anarchists, bigamists and those who seemed too poor to support themselves (a larger problem for women and children) were turned away.
Our article from January 9, 1915, highlights a third hurdle for the immigrants, tests for cognitive ability: “The purpose of our mental measuring scale at Ellis Island is the sorting out of those immigrants who may, because of their mental make-up, become a burden to the State or who may produce offspring that will require care in prisons, asylums, or other institutions.” Anyone who had a “suspected mental defect” or who showed “definite signs of mental disease” were given these tests that we can readily recognize as intelligence tests. Federal law in 1915 required that anyone who failed the tests be turned away.
Our article was authored by Dr. Howard A. Knox of the U.S. Public Health Service. He is widely credited with being a pioneer in developing intelligence tests. He also had some connections with eugenics, now considered to be a wholly unsavory branch of scientific research.
The process sounds frightening—and many people were indeed scared—and perhaps 20 percent of immigrants were detained for testing or while recuperating from illness. In the end, though, only about 2 percent of those people coming to seek a new life were eventually turned away for any of the above reasons.
This article was originally published with the title "50, 100 & 150 Years Ago" in Scientific American 312, 1, (January 2015)
Dan Schlenoff is a contributing editor at Scientific American and has edited the 50, 100 and 150 Years Ago column for one seventh of the magazine's history.
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