When Computers Were Human

by David Alan Grier

  Wood outlined a grand vision for the tabulating machinery. “I was planning to make tests over the whole gamut of the curriculum,” he recalled. Wood provided Watson with a basic understanding of statistical calculation as employed by social scientists and suggested new equipment that might be useful in statistical research. He also worked with IBM engineers to create a progressive digiting machine that could automatically perform multiplication and helped IBM identify a mechanism that would score standardized tests. When called upon to give a speech or demonstrate his equipment or even write a letter of recommendation for Watson’s teenage son, Wood was glad to comply.62 Perhaps his most important contribution was to admit into his laboratory a young astronomy professor named Wallace J. Eckert (1902–1971).63

  Unlike social statistics, astronomical calculation was not a growing field, and unlike the boisterous Wood, Wallace Eckert was a “small and retiring man,” characterized by one IBM historian as “so soft-spoken that he was scarcely audible.”64 A Columbia graduate student went so far as to call him one of the “passé guys,” a scientist who looked to the past rather than anticipating the future.65 Passé or not, Eckert came to the laboratory wanting to see how the punched card machines could handle a classic and difficult calculation, the three-body problem. The specific version of the problem was the system involving the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon. Eckert had an unusually detailed analysis of the problem, which he had obtained from Yale professor Ernest W. Brown (1866–1938). Brown had extended his analysis beyond the three bodies of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun and included the tug from the giant planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune as well as the slosh of the Earth’s oceans as they dragged behind the Moon. He had summarized this solution in a 660-page volume with 180 tables.66

  With Brown’s tables, a computer could determine the position of the Moon for any day and any time, but the labor was almost overwhelming. Writing from the British Nautical Almanac Office, L. J. Comrie complained that the task of preparing a lunar ephemeris from Brown’s tables required “the continuous work of two skilled computers.”67 Comrie transferred this calculation from human computers to the punched card equipment. This new approach to preparing an ephemeris required Comrie to think in terms of operations that were not obvious to the astronomical computer. He selected the tables he needed and punched them onto a separate deck of cards. Each table represented a different force on the moon. Next, he duplicated the cards and shuffled them together, using a card sorter in a downtown London office.68 When he was done, the first cards had the values for January 1, the next cards had the values for January 2, and so forth. In the final step of the calculation, he put the cards for each day through a tabulator in order to sum the values.69 The process was relatively quick and possessed the added benefit that “a small change may be made in the elements and the new values of the coordinates obtained with almost no additional work.”70

  Comrie was not in a position to further develop the methods of punched card computation, as the British Nautical Almanac did not have its own tabulator. However, he sent a copy of his computing plan to Eckert, who had access to Wood’s tabulating facility at Columbia. Eckert studied Comrie’s plan and carefully duplicated the English computations.71 From this work, he slowly began to expand his skill with the tabulating equipment, learning how to handle complicated analyses and difficult computations. By the spring of 1934, he had become the expert in scientific computation with punched card equipment and had supplanted Benjamin Wood as the faculty contact with International Business Machines. That spring, IBM recognized Eckert’s growing prominence by helping him create a new facility, the Columbia University Astronomical Computing Bureau. This organization was not really a separate laboratory, for it used the same machines that were being used to tabulate educational statistics. It did have one new piece of equipment, an IBM 601 multiplying punch, which eliminated the need to do progressive digiting.

  For all of the attention that International Business Machines gave to Columbia University, Benjamin Wood, and Wallace Eckert, the company considered scientific computing to be only a minor application of their equipment. In 1935, the company prepared a book to promote the use of tabulators in higher education, entitled Practical Applications of the Punched Card Methods in Colleges and Universities. The volume was edited by a company employee and was published by Columbia University Press. “So numerous are the uses of the punched card method in colleges and universities,” read the preface, “and so great the interest shown by these institutions that the creation of this volume was a logical development.”72 Fully four-fifths of the contributions to the book were business applications: class records, patient histories, student accounts, course registration, resource scheduling. Of the remaining fifth, most dealt with social statistics. Three entire chapters had been submitted by the statisticians at Iowa State College. Only Eckert’s chapter, buried at the back of the book, dealt with astronomy.

  Eckert began to record the methods of scientific computation in a notebook which was known locally as the “Orange Book.” In the pages of this book, he described how to reduce data, create a star catalog, compare observed positions with theoretical calculations, and mechanize the solution of differential equations.73 His descriptions showed how to prepare the cards and how to work with the sorters, tabulators, and punches. Through 1935 and 1936, scientists began to appear at the door of the laboratory. Some had written to ask for permission to visit; others, who may have been passing through New York or attending a conference down by one of the railroad stations, simply arrived unannounced. They talked with Eckert, handled the cards, watched the machines in operation, worked with one of the machine operators, and usually inquired if they might make a copy of some page of the Orange Book.74

  In 1936, one of Eckert’s visitors was an astronomer from the Soviet Union, the aptly named Boris Numerov. Numerov walked freely among the equipment, listened to Eckert talk about the benefits of punched card calculation, and, most likely, took copies of pages from the Orange Book. When Numerov left the lab, he apparently told Eckert that he would keep in touch or that he might write later or that perhaps he would need Eckert’s assistance in building a punched card facility in the Soviet Union. Eckert accepted the farewell, watched Numerov depart for Moscow, but never heard from him again. It was the era of the Stalinist purges, and Eckert came to believe that the Soviet astronomer had been punished or killed for inquiring about punched card tabulation. It was a misguided concern, as Numerov almost certainly had the permission of the Communist Party for his visit, but it was not without basis in fact. The threat to the astronomer came not from a visit to an American computing laboratory but from a German name for an asteroid. Numerov was arrested after the Soviet secret police learned that German astronomers had named a small planet Numerov. Concluding that anyone who received such an honor from Germany was likely a spy, the secret police had him executed.75

  Eckert may not have appreciated the politics that pulled Numerov to his doom, but he was able to recognize the forces pulling on his computing facility. By 1936, the Columbia Computing Bureau was the prominent facility for scientific computation with punched card equipment, a laboratory far more visible than the Iowa State Statistical Laboratory or the computing office at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As the leader of the astronomical computing bureau, Eckert was increasingly identified with International Business Machines, even though he remained a member of the Columbia faculty. In his writings, however, he made it clear that he was not a blind advocate for IBM, an unquestioning promoter of tabulation equipment. “The main question in any case is not ‘can the problem be solved by these machines,’” he wrote, “but rather ‘have I enough operations of this type or that, to justify such powerful equipment.’”76 Still, his ties with IBM were close, and when he decided to publish his Orange Book of computational methods, he used the publication services of International Business Machines rather than Columbia University Press or some other university publisher.77

>   In 1933, when organized computing had taken root at Indiana University, at the Cowles Commission, and at Columbia University, the National Research Council returned to the idea of preparing a general bibliography of mathematical tables. Some on the council, including Thornton Fry, believed that Davis might be the appropriate person to head the unfinished Subcommittee on the Bibliography of Mathematical Tables and Other Aids for Computation. Others had reservations. Davis would not “be the right man to head up a committee along this line,” wrote Henry Rietz (1875–1943), a professor at the University of Iowa. He observed that Davis expressed more enthusiasm than discipline and that “Professor Davis very strongly believes that the real problem of aids to computation rests in table-making itself rather than in a comprehensive bibliography.”78 The rest of the council reluctantly concurred and continued its search. Finally, they returned to the Aberdeen veterans and selected A. A. Bennett of Brown University, a mathematician who had worked with both Oswald Veblen and Forest Ray Moulton. “Bennett seems especially well-fitted for the work,” argued Rietz, “not only because he would probably do a scholarly piece of work, but because Brown has … the best collection of mathematical tables in connection with any university.”79

  Bennett accepted the chair of the MTAC committee in 1935, but the appointment came at a poor time for him. Along with Oswald Veblen and Gilbert Bliss, he was a consultant to the Aberdeen Proving Ground. In 1935, the proving ground had reorganized the division engaged in ballistics research and had increased the number of test firings on the artillery ranges for the first time in a decade.80 In the years since the First World War, ballistics research had been divided into three distinct fields. The traditional computation of trajectories was now identified as external ballistics, which was contrasted with internal ballistics, the study of the stresses and pressures within a gun. The final division dealt with the physics of exploding shells and was called, appropriately, terminal ballistics. The new Ballistics Research Office had sections devoted to each aspect of the research as well as a new central computing office.81

  Bennett had some initial success organizing the MTAC committee, but he was unable to give the work the kind of effort and attention that it deserved. He wrote to the Galton Laboratory at the University of London to enquire about the plans of Karl Pearson. Pearson’s son replied that his father had died the year before but that he had left a great deal of material which might be used by the new committee. Bennett also asked a half dozen individuals, including H. T. Davis and L. J. Comrie, to join him on the committee and help with the bibliography. Writing from Colorado, Davis exclaimed that “I am very much pleased to accept membership on this Committee because I believe sincerely in the importance of the project.”82 Comrie, however, was more circumspect. “Am I right in interpreting ‘Aids to Computation’ as meaning calculating machines?” he asked.83 Only after Bennett assured him that such machines would have a place in the bibliography did he agree to serve.84

  Comrie’s ability to contribute to MTAC would be limited. The problem was not so much the economy as it was a fall from grace, a small lapse of judgment. In the winter of 1935–36, the British Admiralty discovered that Comrie had not been accurately reporting the activity of the Nautical Almanac Office. Comrie was convinced that his staff was too small and that he was unable to retain the best computers because of Admiralty personnel regulations. Unable to make his point through memos and arguments, he was trying to impress upon the Admiralty the shortcomings of their policies by delaying the release of important work. He told his supervisors that the almanac computers were overworked and unable to do certain computations when, in fact, those computations were already finished and residing in Comrie’s files.85 The flaw in this strategy was exposed when an investigative board arrived unannounced at the almanac office. The board discovered the missing computations, charged Comrie with obstructing Admiralty work, and dismissed him.86 “Comrie’s often-expressed complaints that the civil service regulations were petty and restrictive are given some justification by [the record],” observed historian Mary Croarken, “but it is also clear that Comrie was inept at ‘playing the game’” and working effectively within a large government organization.87

  After his departure from the British Nautical Almanac, Comrie rented a building in London and formed a private computing laboratory, the Scientific Computing Service Ltd. The company grew quickly, sustained in no little part by computing contracts from the British government, including his former employer, the Admiralty. In less than a year, he employed a staff of sixteen computers, “most of whom have academic training,” he boasted. The company handled the same kinds of calculations that were done at the Nautical Almanac Office: navigation tables, astronomical calculations, statistical summaries. Looking for commercial business, it also advertised a specialty in the analysis of questionnaires and “an advisory and investigational service relating to the purchase and use of calculating machines.”88

  Though Comrie’s new company prospered, his fall from grace had consequences. His scientific life was burdened with the need to satisfy bank officers, customers, and investors. He could no longer freely volunteer his time to scientific organizations, either the Subcommittee on the Bibliography for Mathematical Tables and Other Aids for Computation or the Mathematical Tables Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He could remain a member of both groups and could contribute to the work of each, but he could not afford to take a leadership role. In his new position, he had to earn his own way and support the economic prosperity of his company.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Scientific Relief

  Get that human adding machine out of my way. …

  Clare Boothe Luce, The Women (1937)

  MALCOLM MORROW (1906–1982) was the faceless bureaucrat of computation, the government worker who created the largest human computing group of the 1930s but left little record of himself. He lived in a working-class district of Washington, D.C., only a few blocks from the original Naval Observatory and the building that had once housed Simon Newcomb’s Nautical Almanac Office.1 He held jobs in several of the New Deal agencies and eventually settled into the executive office of the Work Projects Administration (WPA)2 as an assistant statistician. His title gives us little information about his mathematical ability, as the WPA employed many assistant statisticians. Some were nothing more than clerks. Some were project managers. Some prepared questionnaires. Only a few were employed in the analysis of data.

  Morrow’s WPA was the largest and most developed of the New Deal’s relief agencies. Formed in 1935, it was Franklin Roosevelt’s third attempt to reduce unemployment through the construction of public works. The WPA operated offices in each of the forty-eight states, as well as an extra office in New York City, that provided funds for projects judged to be in the public good. The WPA paid for parks and bridges in New York City, sidewalks in Michigan, dams in Texas, city offices in Los Angeles, 226 hospitals, 1,000 libraries, 1,200 airport buildings, 2,700 firehouses, 9,300 auditoriums. WPA workers renovated the army’s research facility at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, repaired the Naval Observatory in Washington, and constructed a new building for the Iowa State Statistical Laboratory.3

  In general, the WPA did not manage the projects that operated under its name. It provided only wages for workers. Local organizations would identify appropriate projects, develop plans, and pay for any necessary materials. Only rarely would the WPA staff in Washington plan and manage a project without the assistance of a local sponsor. Those projects that were directly overseen by the WPA tended to be national in scope, such as the Federal Theater Project and the Federal Writers’ Project. The theater project supported performing arts across the country and proved to be a controversial activity. While only a few of the theater productions had any political content, notably Orson Welles’s The Cradle Will Rock and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, the project was the target of conservative critics who claimed that the government-supported artists we
re promoting liberal ideas and undermining American society. Eventually, the critics found enough support within Congress to terminate all WPA theatrical productions.

  The writers’ project generated less controversy, but it experienced serious operational problems. The project was intended to support regional authors by having them create guidebooks for each state of the union. The Washington WPA office provided a style manual that described how the “geographic, historic, cultural, social, recreational, industrial and commercial information should be assembled.” In spite of the best intentions, the project was unable to recruit sufficient regional talent to prepare the guides. Not wanting to see a visible project fail, the WPA administrators had many of the guidebooks rewritten “by experienced writers drawn from New York City and other centers, who were paid for their work on a non-relief basis.”4