Sailing True North

by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret. )

  Rear Admiral “Amazing” Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was the great-granddaughter of a Civil War Union admiral, a fact of which she was very cognizant. She often wove her nautical legacy into stories she would tell, notably one about nearly drowning as a child on the family’s lake after a small sailboat in which she was embarked capsized and her mother yelled at her to “remember the admiral” from the dock. (“Swim, Grace, dammit” might have been better advice. And I say that as an admiral myself.)

  The essence of understanding the enormous impact of Admiral Hopper on the US Navy lies in appreciating the sweep of technology that occurred over her lifetime. She arrived into the world at a time when the Navy still had ships with “backup” sailing masts and had only recently emerged from the smashing victories of the Spanish-American War. There were effectively no submarines or maritime-operated aircraft. Communications relied on the use of signal flags in most cases. Ships were fired by coal, and much of early-twentieth-century strategy (developed, of course, by Alfred Thayer Mahan) centered upon the perceived need for coaling stations where warships could stop, refuel, conduct voyage repairs, and continue their endless patrols establishing control of the seas for America. They were not terribly complex machines, and their primitive fire control systems to direct their massive guns relied mostly on line-of-sight observations. There were few technological demands on a warship, and the essence of operating a ship at sea was simple seamanship, engineering, and gunnery.

  The First World War drove many advances in warship technology, including the advent of submarine warfare, some maritime patrol aircraft, and the use of dirigibles for observations, which were based on larger ships. The business of maritime warfare was still relatively simple. But the post–World War I period saw technology advances in a wide variety of disciplines, and by the time Grace would join the Navy in the mid-1940s, much had changed across the fleet. Radio communications had become the norm, ships were all oil-fired and their engineering plants far more resilient and sophisticated, submarines were better equipped with offensive weapons, fire control systems had better means of using inputs from radars, and carriers brought relatively high-performance aircraft to sea. But there was not yet a need for the truly complex systems that would emerge following the Second World War that would drive the need for a computer-based fleet. As Grace Hopper entered the Navy and the long trajectory of her career began, the beginnings of the computer revolution appeared in the emerging need for high-speed missile fire control, analysis of complex undersea acoustic signals, satellite navigation and communication, gunnery systems that automatically engaged incoming targets, advanced propulsion including eventually nuclear power and gas turbines—on and on. Hopper’s voyage through the second half of the twentieth century ran parallel with the need for big tranches of data analysis, high speed of response, and seamless integration of complex combat and engineering systems—in other words, the need for digital to replace analog. Her career reflected that shift and enabled the even more complex warships of today.

  She was born in 1906 into a loving family, her parents discovering and encouraging her attraction to technology early on in their New York City home and their New Hampshire retreat. She frequently took things apart to understand how they worked—beginning with seven alarm clocks she disassembled at the age of seven. She recalled it later, saying, “What happened was that I’d taken the first one apart and I couldn’t get it back together, so I opened the next one. I ended up with all seven of them apart. After that I was restricted to one clock. It’s that kind of curiosity: How do things work.” Always academically inclined and precocious, she entered Vassar at seventeen and graduated in 1928 with a Phi Beta Kappa key, having studied both mathematics and physics. Two years later, she completed a master’s at Yale, and went on to pursue a PhD in mathematics, completing the degree in 1934. She began teaching math at Yale in 1931 and married fellow academic and NYU professor Vincent Hopper—taking and keeping his name for the rest of her life—although they ended up divorcing in 1945. As she said, “I was very fortunate that my father believed his daughters should be given the same opportunities as his son, so my sister and I both went to Vassar. It was a little unusual back in those days.”

  Her life might well have continued on a comfortable academic track if the United States had not been forced into the Second World War by the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, around the middle of the day on the East Coast. Grace and her husband Vincent were sitting in their study in New York City on Ninety-fifth Street in Manhattan on opposite sides of a big double desk, surrounded by books and with the windows letting in the watery early winter light. If so, she would likely have been reading while chain-smoking Lucky Strikes. There were always books in her world. She would eventually spend her final days in a small apartment filled with cartons of research papers and magnetic tapes, a portable television set, and stacks of books numbering around ten thousand volumes—from murder mysteries to complex electrical engineering textbooks. She was a deeply gifted mathematician, of course, but at the heart of her character was a huge sense of curiosity about nearly everything—which she satisfied by reading voraciously and widely.

  At the start of the war, Hopper was in a troubled marriage. Her husband Vincent, a gifted writer and teacher, loved her, but something simply did not work in their marriage—some fundamental quality was missing from their connection with each other, a piece of wiring across which the electrons of love never freely flowed. She was also very concerned about finding a way to serve her country and longed for a bigger life than the academic world seemed capable of providing. When she heard the news of Pearl Harbor, the world spun around, once, twice, and again, she would later say. In an instant she knew her life would change forever, and in her heart, she also knew her marriage was over. The attack somehow blended and crystallized the discontent she felt throughout her married life. She would later say that she knew immediately that she would walk out of the marriage, and that she hoped to join the Navy. After their divorce, her husband eventually married one of her bridesmaids and went on to a distinguished career as a professor and scholar at New York University—exactly the life she wanted to avoid. She continued to use her married name and virtually never spoke of the divorce. After a time, people began to assume she was a widow, perhaps of a World War II veteran.

  At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, there were no women in the US Navy. In a certain sense, the attack figuratively blew her life apart; and when the pieces came back together, she was forged anew in the crucible created by a national crisis that enabled for her a new calling and a new life—in the US Navy. While she would never sail on warships at sea for any significant number of days, her service as an admiral of the twentieth-century Navy was vital to her nation in ways she never could have imagined on December 7, 1941.

  After the conflict broke out, the Navy began to accept women into its ranks, but at only 105 pounds, she was well below the Navy’s minimum weight of 120 pounds and was initially denied the chance to serve. The rejection was possibly also related to the fact that her work as a professor at Vassar was considered important to the war effort and that she was in her mid-thirties at that point. But as much as anything it was the physical appearance of frailness that held her back. But by 1943, her persistence paid off; after training with the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Smith College, she was commissioned into the Navy in 1944.

  Her initial assignment as a WAVE—Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service—was under the auspices of the Bureau of Ships at Harvard. Along with her boss and mentor Howard Aiken, a towering, hard-driven Navy captain, she cowrote papers on primitive computational devices. After graduating from the initial entry school, called “Midshipmen’s School,” she hoped to be assigned to the Navy’s code-breaker unit, the Naval Communication Annex. She felt her training in mathematics made this an ideal first assignment. But during her time at Midshipmen’s School, an innovative computing device was produced by IBM an
d sent to Harvard under the authority of the Navy. Young Lieutenant (junior grade) Grace Hopper would not go to the Naval Communication Annex; instead, she would become one of the first several people to program the world’s first computer.

  This massive (eight feet in height and more than fifty feet long, weighing five tons) primitive computer was essentially an automatic calculating machine. But using a paper tape mechanism, it could accept instructions from a human. Under the direction of Aiken, Hopper began to work on what eventually became known as the Mark I computer (a Navy term for a system simply meaning it was the first version, much as we use 1.0 or 2.0 today). It would be used to study trajectories for missiles, solve complex weapons and fire control programs, analyze radio waves, validate ship construction, and many other war-critical tasks. Hopper was at the heart of these efforts, part of a small, elite, and highly visionary Navy team at Harvard.

  The work environment was a long way from the ocean. Located in the physics lab at Harvard, it was guarded by armed sailors, and both her boss—the formidable Captain Aiken—and the tasks were challenging. Aiken immediately put her to work calculating arctangents (complex mathematic functions that are essentially the inverse of a normal tangent function). Since such work could not be done with extreme accuracy without a massive calculating machine, she was forced, essentially immediately, to “program” (the word did not exist in 1944 in terms of computers) the IBM Mark I. Like Aiken and the handful of coworkers (all naval personnel and all male), Hopper had to make it up as she went along. Even as she took over the job of programming the Mark I (along with a new ensign, Richard Milton Bloch), Hopper knew she was solving important problems in the effort to win the war. Her work specifically enabled far higher degrees of accuracy in radar and missile technology, a significant contribution to the war effort. What she could not know at the time was how her initial work would reverberate today in the everyday process of humans directing machines to solve problems.

  It is important to note that Hopper understood that to make the idea of “programming” work, she would have to understand the mechanics of the machine. The Mark I had close to a million distinct parts, and she spent a great deal of time looking through blueprints to truly comprehend the functionality of the machine. She then had to develop the means via punch tapes to direct the movements—the raw computational work—of the Mark I. Naturally, this first “computer” was primitive compared with modern devices, and therefore it was even more challenging given that commands often had to be inputted in real time to force the necessary computations. Through sheer determination, she was able to improve the machine’s performance. At heart, the extraordinary accomplishment of Admiral Hopper was taming this mechanical beast, and thus embarking on the great voyage of modern computer science during her wartime experiences in the Navy.

  Hopper also spent a good deal of time outside the lab, engaging with other nascent computer efforts supporting the war. All of this was happening as the war entered its critical phase, including the landings at Normandy, the crucial island battles of the Pacific, the final bombing campaigns into the heart of the Germany, and ultimately the surrenders of Germany and Japan. You can directly connect her work with the Mark I computer to some of the tactical successes in the war, as well as to the longer-term entry of the US Navy into the computer age.

  It was during this period that the term “bug” emerged in the context of early computers. At one point, Hopper described literally finding a bug—an enterprising moth—inside the Mark II, the follow-on computer to her beloved Mark I. She said it was about four inches in size, and was the cause of the machine “conking out.” They took the moth out and taped it into the logbook describing the night’s events; it is part of the Smithsonian museums’ collection today, perhaps the most famous moth in history. After that, when anything went wrong with the computers, the entire Navy team would talk about the “bugs” in the program (or the machine).

  After the war, Hopper remained committed to the Navy, turning down tenure at Vassar to stay with the Navy Computational Lab under the irascible Captain Aiken well into the late 1940s, long after the war ended. Despite the pressure-cooker environment he created at the lab, she would later describe Aiken as the best leader she ever met. Both Lieutenant Hopper and her dedicated sidekick Ensign Richard Bloch continued their work even as support waned somewhat within the Navy—although Aiken was able to obtain funding for the Mark II and Mark III computers. In order to ensure continuity, the key members of the project were shifted over to the Naval Reserve (so they could not be transferred to high-priority active-duty assignments). As other civilian teammates joined in, the naval feel of the project diminished somewhat, and tensions between the “plank owners” (a Navy term for those who had been there from the beginning, such as Hopper) and the new arrivals increased. Luckily for Hopper, she was a favorite of Aiken’s and able to continue her pioneering work with a minimum of interference. She and Richard Bloch worked on the frontiers of programming, driving the use of subroutines and using magnetic drums instead of paper tapes.

  When she eventually departed Harvard to go her own way after the Navy’s contract expired in 1949, she stayed in the Navy reserves, but was interested in more private-sector experience. By the early 1950s, Hopper was becoming a pioneer in working with UNIVAC computers, the first powerful computational device that was commercially produced in the United States. She worked closely with two men, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and their legendary work together was fundamental to the chain of events that would eventually lead to Hopper’s central role in bringing the Navy into the computer age. It was not easy. Looking back on it, she recalled, “I can remember once I went to the general manager of UNIVAC to get some money or people. He said no, and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll quit. I’ll clean out my desk and leave this afternoon.’ He beckoned me to come back and said, ‘Wait a minute Grace, you’ve already done that once this year, you can’t do it again.’ You must stand on your own two feet. That’s half the fun.” There were also challenges, including an arrest on drunk and disorderly conduct, accompanied by dark thoughts of suicide, according to several biographers. But the overall trajectory of her life continued upward, and her innovative course remained true north for her.

  She was also an early advocate of creating computer languages that were approachable by nonmathematicians. By the early 1960s, the language known as COBOL, which she helped develop, was gaining in importance as the industry realized the value of more accessible language-based systems of control for computers as opposed to numerically based ones. As her reputation grew, the Navy found new uses for her: for a decade, from 1967 to 1977, she was director of the Navy’s Programming Languages Group. She came to Annapolis often in those years to encourage the use of both COBOL and Fortran (Formula Translation), as well as mandatory coursework in computers for the entire Brigade of Midshipmen. It was the influence of Rear Admiral Hopper on the Navy that opened the door for basic computer science in the hidebound traditional curriculum of the Naval Academy. It was also during this period of her service that I met her, and the impression was indelible.

  By the late 1970s, her work had pushed not only the Navy but the entire Department of Defense toward creating smaller and more distributed networks. The early forerunners of the systems in use today on all Navy ships were the direct result of Grace Hopper’s determination to innovate and drive the Navy forward. For example, via her work with the Naval Reserve, she was the first to coherently and forcefully advocate for the use of computers on ships at sea. Regarded as a foolish notion at first (much as the ideas of airplanes operating from ships was once dismissed), the concept grew in her mind as technology permitted more computational power in smaller and more stable machines. She correctly foresaw the limited utility of massive mainframe devices and the resultant need to connect numerous smaller systems. In this sense, she was ahead of many of the later pioneers in the revolution in personal computing, from Ed Roberts to Steve Wozniak to Steve
Jobs. Perhaps most important throughout the 1970s and onward, she articulated the idea of a “computer age,” and the synthesis of humans and machines. Taking all that she had learned in the Navy Computational Lab about how humans could efficiently communicate with massive calculating machines, she was able to extrapolate forward to envision endless uses for the techniques and technologies she pioneered. She was also instrumental in helping lay the groundwork for the universal standards developed for connecting physically disparate computational systems, today under the auspices of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This work was part of the vital technological leap that permitted the internet to evolve (from the Department of Defense systems, by the way). At every turning point in the computer age, Rear Admiral Hopper was present and central in her contributions.

  Having served throughout the post–World War II decades in the Naval Reserve (where she remained very connected to the Navy, participating in many conferences, weekend drills, and stints on active duty), she was required to finally retire as a full commander at the age of sixty in 1967. But the Navy was experiencing difficulties implementing COBOL, and she was once again activated. Initially “called up” for a six-month assignment, she quickly proved indispensable. The six months turned into a year, then another, and eventually ended up lasting twenty years. As a result, she was able to continue to be promoted. She was first promoted to captain in 1973 and was “pinned on” by the chief of naval operations, Elmo Zumwalt—two kindred spirits, each supporting innovation in every way. Her fame continued to grow, as she was more and more the subject of media profiles, including one on 60 Minutes. She was increasingly in demand as a speaker at military and industry conferences all over the country. All of the attention culminated in a special act of Congress in 1983 that approved her promotion to one-star rank, at the time called “commodore,” and later rear admiral (lower half); rear admirals (upper half) have two stars. In the end, her Navy career spanned forty-two years, and she retired in 1986 in a well-attended ceremony on board the world’s oldest commissioned warship, USS Constitution, in Boston Harbor, at the age of seventy-nine. She was among an elite handful of admirals to have served to such a senior age, along with Nimitz, William Leahy, and Rickover.