THE AVERAGE AMERICAN - The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen by KEVIN O'KEEFE

FROM CHAPTER 1: "ALL THAT IS GREAT, GOOD OR BEAUTIFUL"

Candidates remaining: 281,421,906

My muse was not average. A former opera composer and historian of love from Belgium, he was fond of wearing the type of high pompadour and low sideburns that Elvis - a century later - would make famous.

His name was Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, and he had died in 1874.

After surviving a childhood marked by poverty and tragedy - he was only seven when his dad died - Quetelet flirted with careers in music, poetry, journalism, and painting, then all but invented the field of social statistics. He created the first international statistics conference, and one of his breakthrough discoveries showed that human actions commonly reveal a pattern, known today as the bell curve, with the most average result charted in the peak position. Based on his belief that average was ideal, he formulated a new investigative tool for law enforcement - criminal profiling: Individuals became suspects if they deviated a certain degree from average models.

Quetelet (pronounced kettle-ay) understood that people who are viewed as atypical are often proven to be less so when actual social statistics are applied. For instance, Napoleon was - and still is - widely characterized as short simply because he was shorter than most French military men, the people with whom he spent so much of his public time. Quetelet, whose transition into statistical work was shepherded by Napoleon’s one-time minister of the interior, knew that among Frenchmen of his day, Napoleon was actually of ordinary height.

In 1827, Quetelet had a brainstorm. He believed that with a single idea, he could complete both the ultimate statistical study and the ultimate quest. He would set out to define the demographically average person, embarking on a search for the planet’s consummate life form. “If an individual at any given epoch of society possessed all the qualities of the average man, he would represent all that is great, good or beautiful,” Quetelet proclaimed.

Quetelet started his search by charting averages - for example, the median chest measurement among 5,738 Scottish soldiers. Eight years later, he had determined the average age, strength, and drunkenness of assorted Europeans, among other categories of data.

Quetelet’s 1835 book on his research - later translated into English as A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties - presented statistical charts for average individuals, using such measurements as height, weight, age, profession, and geographical region. From all his averages, Quetelet presented statistical profiles of average people, but there is no record of his ever identifying or even attempting to identify a specific average person.

Nonetheless, contemporary readers were captivated by his effort. Stephen Stigler wrote in his 1986 book The History of Statistics about the impact of Quetelet’s study: “The average man was a fictional being in his creator’s eye, but such was his appeal that he underwent a transformation, like Pinocchio or Pygmalion’s statue, so that he still lives in headlines of our daily newspapers.”

Today’s headlines often characterize the average American not as great, good, or beautiful, but as fat, dumb, and ugly. However, the majority of Americans are of healthy weight, the nation’s average intelligence score has continued to rise about four points every decade since nationwide IQ testing began in the 1920s, and scientific evidence shows that when it comes to facial beauty, we prefer averageness, even in strangers.

In recognition of Quetelet and John Q Public, and to separate fact from fiction, I began to fill a notebook, christened Mr. Q, with the most reputable statistics I could find about the average American.

On a misty day in December 2003, I headed with my new traveling companion to the headquarters of the U.S. Census Bureau.

The U.S. Census, held every ten years since 1790, was first conducted by Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state under President Washington. The national head count - taken by U.S. marshals on horseback - came in at 3.9 million people, although Jefferson told the president that the tally was probably some 100,000 people short.

The national census Quetelet created for Belgium in 1846 quickly became the international standard-bearer. Quetelet’s careful data collection and statistical analysis so impressed Congressman James Garfield that the future president tracked down Quetelet to learn how to improve the U.S. Census.

Soon, the Census Bureau was an incubator for scientific advances, particularly those that had to do with efficient calculation. For the 1890 census, a bureau employer named Herman Hollerith invented the punch card, then left to launch a start-up company that later became International Business Machines, abbreviated by Hollerith as IBM. Separately, UNIVAC I, the world’s first commercial computer, was created specifically to help process the 1950 census.

Today, the U.S. Census is not only the oldest continuing public census in the world, but the finest measurement of grand-scale human averageness. When I arrived at the Census Bureau, the 2000 census - or Census 2000, as its handlers prefer - had already generated more than 1.5 billion pages of data, enough to stretch from the earth to the moon. It included information on people living in more than 105 million occupied housing units (let’s call them homes) on more than 8 million blocks. At a cost of nearly $10 billion, the U.S. Census had become the largest social science project in history. Although it doesn’t measure fatness, dumbness, or ugliness, it serves as an important debunker to many other myths associated with the average American. Consider the notion that the most typical American is an adult in a traditional nuclear family - a married man or woman living with an opposite-sex spouse and offspring under eighteen years old. Census 2000 showed that the nuclear family now represents fewer than a quarter of all U.S. homes. Families consisting of a working dad, stay-at-home mom, and offspring make up only 7 percent of U.S. homes.

Surrounded by a high security fence, the Census Bureau headquarters in the Washington suburb of Suitland, Maryland, resembles a prison. Its flat and square main building - simply "Federal Office Building 3," according to the only sign out front - was slapped together in a few months as temporary World War II office space. Contaminated water, flooding, and electrical outages have long plagued the campus's four structures. When a supercomputer was installed in Office Building 4 in 1999, the floor couldn't hold it, freeing asbestos that had been idling for years.

Less than a half hour after I asked to speak with the nation's director of population analysis, I found myself in a small conference room sitting across from him.