Introduction to Survey Sampling

At some time in the mid-1780s, Pierre Laplace started to press the French government to conduct an enumeration of the population in about 700 communes scattered over the kingdom, with a view to estimate the total population of France. He intended to use, for this purpose, the fact that there was already a substantially complete registration of births in all communes, of which there would then have been the order of 10,000. He reasoned that if he also knew the populations of those sample communes, he could estimate the ratio of population to annual births and apply that ratio to the known number of births in a given year to arrive at a ratio estimate of the total French population. For various reasons, however, notably the ever-expanding borders of the French empire during Napoleon's early years, events militated against his obtaining a suitable total of births for the entire French population; therefore, his estimated ratio was never used for its original purpose. He did, however, devise an ingenious way for estimating the precision with which that ratio was measured. This was less straightforward than the manner in which it would be estimated today, but, at the time, it was a very considerable contribution to the theory of survey sampling.