The 300 millionth American? Later this year, the U.S. population will reach a milestone. A look at how the nation has changed since we hit 200 million in 1967.

• Author: Roberts, Sam
• Position: NATIONAL

Sometime in October, if the experts are right, the 300-millionth American will be born. How can experts make such a prediction? Well, as of mid-January, the population of the United States was almost 297,900,000, according to the Census Bureau.

With a baby being born every 8 seconds, someone dying every 12 seconds, and the nation gaining an immigrant every 31 seconds on average, the population is estimated to be growing by one person every 14 seconds. At that rate, the total is expected to top 300 million about eight months from now.

"You end up with a number in October," says Katrina Wengert, a demographer and a keeper of the Census Bureau's official Population Clock. The clock is actually a contrivance, based on statistical calculations, since the Census Bureau doesn't actually send a representative to all the nation's hospitals to count people as they're born, or to the borders or airports to count each new immigrant.

But rest assured that hospital publicists, baby-food manufacturers, public officials, and countless others are already guesstimating the growth rate to anoint any number of unsuspecting newborns--11,000 are born every day--as the mythical American who pushed the nation's population to 300 million. (Of course, the 300-millionth could be an adult immigrant, even one who crossed the border illegally, but statistics favor a native-born baby.)

CELEBRATING 200 MILLION

In 1967, when the population reached 200 million, Life magazine sent 23 photographers to locate the baby and devoted a five-page article to its search. Instead of deciding on a statistically valid symbol of the average American newborn, the magazine chose to find a baby born at precisely the appointed time, according to the Population Clock.

Life ended up immortalizing Robert Ken Woo Jr. of Atlanta, whose parents, a computer programmer and a chemical engineer, had emigrated seven years earlier from China.

Woo turned out to be a good representative of the American Dream: He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and is a lawyer. Now 38, he still lives in Atlanta with his wife, Angie, also a lawyer, and their three daughters. "He did feel an obligation to do well," Angie Woo says. "But I think he would have done well, regardless."

Given the demographic changes recorded in the 20th century, the 300-millionth American will likely be a very different person from the prototypical 200-millionth American in 1967, or in 1915, when the nation's population passed...