When Computers Were Human

by David Alan Grier

  There is some evidence to support Rhodes’s story. Comrie did hear a radio broadcast on December 3 and, a few days later, sent a telegram to President Roosevelt. The message was free of “choice language about boondoogling” but said simply: “British scientists engaged on war work hope you will provide for continued activity of New York Work Projects Administration Mathematical Tables Project.”79 There is no comment on the artificial leg and no record that the telegram made it from Roosevelt to the office of the WPA. There was too large a gap between the responsibilities of the president and the little project that Lowan oversaw. Furthermore, Comrie had no standing with the government of the United States. He had only limited affiliation with American scientific institutions and commanded no American votes. Even if the telegram had reached the WPA office and been entered into its communication log, the program officers would have recognized that Comrie had written several times to the agency and that his last letter had not been so complimentary. Only six month before, Comrie had complained that the computation of the Mathematical Tables Project “seems to me extravagant, and to savour of computing gone amok.”80 Comrie’s December telegram reached the Mathematical Tables Project only because Comrie sent a copy of it to Arnold Lowan and Lowan distributed copies of the message to all of his supporters.81

  In fact, when Comrie sent his urgent telegram, two efforts were under way to commandeer the project for military work. The first came from the navy, which had discovered that there were no other large computing laboratories in the United States that were prepared to handle LORAN computations. The woman Rhodes recalls visiting the project was likely Regina Schlachter, a lieutenant (junior grade) attached to the navy’s Hydrographic Office. Schlachter visited the Mathematical Tables Project one month before Comrie sent his telegram to Roosevelt. Schlachter examined the operations of the project, determined that the calculations could be secured, and recommended that the navy claim the services of one mathematician, Milton Abramowitz, sixty calculating machines, ten typists, and forty-nine computers.82

  With the resources of the Mathematical Tables Project, Lt. Schlachter organized a new computing office, named the New York Hydrographic Project. She found space for the group at the Hudson Terminal Building, a complex of offices in Lower Manhattan that was later redeveloped into the World Trade Center. Workers from the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard cleared the rooms, reinforced the doors, and installed a safe. At the request of the navy, Lt. Schlachter installed a twenty-four-hour guard at the facility. She deferred all mathematical questions to Abramowitz, who was assisted by an MIT professor with a reserve commission.83

  The hydrographic computers were a small cross section of New York’s population. There were twenty-six men and twenty-three women. The group included a Weinberg, a Sinclair, a Nabokov, an O’Brien, a Dalrimple, and a Cordova. Some of the computers came from Brooklyn, some from the Bronx, and a few from the neighborhood of Harlem. The navy made no attempt to investigate the loyalty of these workers. Instead, it tried to isolate the computers and prevent them from having access to the final tables. The computing sheets made no reference to LORAN or navigation. There was no indication of time, of radio frequencies, or even of longitude and latitude. When computers resigned, the navy tended to replace them with the wives of servicemen, reasoning that women with a personal stake in the success of the military would be unlikely to betray the office.84

  The actions of the navy were matched by a decision from the National Defense Research Committee. In the fall of 1942, the committee was in the middle of a major reorganization, which expanded the number of divisions. During this effort, the committee created a new division called the Applied Mathematics Panel and put this group under the leadership of Rockefeller Foundation mathematician Warren Weaver.85 This panel was the offspring of the division devoted to fire control, a division that was also led by Weaver. Weaver had argued for the Applied Mathematics Panel because “the demands to carry out analytical studies kept increasing rapidly”86 and because, without it, new devices could not be designed, tested, manufactured, and deployed “in time to affect the conduct of the war.”87 In general, the “analytical studies” were expansions of ballistics work, “the mathematical analysis of certain fundamental problems.”88 These studies developed mathematical models for bombing runs, antiaircraft fire, shock wave propagation, and other aspects of weapons operations.

  Weaver recruited Thornton Fry of Bell Telephone Laboratories to be the vice-chair of the committee and asked Oswald Veblen to bring his experience from the First World War. In all, about ten mathematicians served on the Applied Mathematics Panel, including Princeton professors S. S. Wilks (1906–1964) and Marston Morse (1892–1977) and New York University mathematician Richard Courant (1888–1972). For a time, the brother of Oswald Veblen’s First World War colleague Forest Ray Moulton served as staff to the committee.89 At the first meeting of the panel in January 1943, Weaver opened the discussions by identifying computing as “a large and important need” and argued that the work of the panel would “doubtless involve several broad contracts with groups such as the Lowan WPA Computing Group, the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau, the Computing Center at MIT, etc.”90

  The Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau was the new name for Wallace Eckert’s old laboratory at Columbia. The Computing Center at MIT was a small group of computers working directly with Phil Morse.91 As both of these organizations were university research labs, they were obvious candidates for Applied Mathematics Panel contracts. The Mathematical Tables Project was more problematic. Weaver told the first meeting of the panel that he had met with Arnold Lowan and Gertrude Blanch in mid-November, three full weeks before the WPA announced its liquidation. He reported that it was a good discussion and that he came away from the meeting with a better understanding of how the group operated and the kind of work it was able to do. He wanted the panel to take control of the project, though he admitted that no “significant fraction of the group could be cleared” and that the computers would have to be limited to “work of such a general character that could be unclassified.”92

  Among the members of the Applied Mathematics Panel, only Warren Weaver was interested in taking responsibility for the Mathematical Tables Project. Weaver went looking for more support by polling the leaders of the National Defense Research Committee divisions to see if they might make use of a large computing office. On January 14, he sent a mimeographed letter to the nineteen leaders and waited for the replies. In less than two weeks, he had four votes in favor of the Mathematical Tables Project and fifteen votes against. As he reviewed the comments from the different divisions, Weaver decided to ignore the poll and his own concerns about security. “Of my own knowledge,” he told the Applied Mathematics Panel, “I can say that if Dr. Lowan’s group were disbanded, another group of several dozen computers (at least) would have to be set up in NDRC somewhere to take care of the calculations which Dr. Lowan is at present carrying on for various sections of the NDRC.”93

  For a time, Weaver went looking for an alternative to the Mathematical Tables Project, a computing office that had no history of work relief and no baggage of security problems, but there was no organization with a similar expertise in scientific computation. “I hear that you have considerable computing machines at Vassar [College] and that you have some experience with them,” he wrote to a mathematics professor named Grace Hopper (1906–1992). “Are you interested in doing work for the Applied Mathematics Panel?”94 Hopper was available for the work, but she was hoping to win a commission with the navy. The navy was resisting her overtures, claiming that she was too old, at the age of thirty-six, and was underweight. Undaunted, Hopper persisted and finally received her commission. The navy assigned her to Howard Aiken’s computing facility at Harvard, which handled a variety of calculations for weapons and communications research.95

  Unable to find any alternative to the Mathematical Tables Project, Weaver began to bring the group under the control of the Applied
Mathematics Panel and was surprised to discover that Arnold Lowan was circulating his own plan for the project. Lowan proposed two options to the Applied Mathematics Panel. The first would establish a group of six mathematicians and fifty computers; the second would keep the same number of mathematicians but retain only twenty-five computers. When asked about the plan, Weaver confessed that he was “just a little embarrassed by this whole situation.” He had no direction from the National Defense Research Committee, and “my only information concerning the budgetary possibilities is contained in an estimate which I believe Dr. Lowan prepared … and a copy reached me by an indirect route.” After studying the document, Weaver decided to accept the smaller of the two plans. With a single letter, he swept away all the restrictions of the WPA and most of the stigma of work relief. The Mathematical Tables Project would be a contractor to the Applied Mathematics Panel. It would operate as an office of the National Bureau of Standards, though Lowan would take his orders from the panel. The agenda for the group was no longer set by a New Deal agency in Washington but by a committee of well-respected mathematicians.96

  Even though Arnold Lowan would have to sacrifice seventy-five computers, he was pleased with the offer from the Applied Mathematics Panel and told Philip Morse that this “very satisfactory arrangement is unquestionably due to a great extent to your constant efforts on our behalf, for which please accept the expression of our warm gratitude.”97 Lowan had about two weeks to finish his obligations to the WPA and prepare for his new assignment. March 15 was the last day of operation as a relief project. The computers packed their equipment, burned old computing sheets, and disposed of the posters that had guided them. As the Mathematical Tables Project shed the seventy-five computers, it also shed the manual computing division. When the project opened its new office, all computers would use adding machines or mechanical calculators.98 Ida Rhodes would identify this move as the time that “life began,”99 the moment when the Mathematical Tables Project finally dropped the trappings of work relief and become a professional computing organization.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Midtown New York Glide Bomb Club

  I am asked to think out an abstract problem when I am very tired out with a multitude of infinitesimal concrete and immediate problems. …

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within and Without (1943)

  THE WINTER OF 1943 marked the start of the imperial age of the human computer, the era of great growth for scientific computing laboratories. It seemed as if all the combatants discovered a need for organized computing that winter. A German group started preparing mathematical tables at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt.1 Japan, which had received material from the Mathematical Tables Project through 1942, formed a computing group in Tokyo.2 The British government operated computing groups in Bath, Wynton, Cambridge, and London.3 Within the United States, there were at least twenty computing organizations at work that winter, including laboratories in Washington, Hampton Roads, Aberdeen, Philadelphia, Providence, Princeton, Pasadena, Ames, Lynn, Los Alamos, Dahlgren, Chicago, Oak Ridge, and New York City. Most of these calculating staffs were small, consisting of five to ten computers. Langley Field, a major aeronautical research center in Virginia, employed about a dozen such groups, each assigned to a specific research division. “Some [groups] have as many as ten computers,” explained a history of the center, “while others have one computer who often devotes a part of her time to typing and secretarial duties.”4 Only a few computing laboratories were as large as the New York Hydrographic Project with its forty-nine veterans of the Mathematical Tables Project or the thirty-person computing office of the Naval Weapons Laboratory at Dahlgren, Virginia.5

  Amidst this growth of computing offices, the MTAC committee finally came to life and began to chronicle the literature of calculation. Nearly eighteen months after his confrontation with Luther Eisenhart and the National Research Council forced him to retreat, R. C. Archibald had returned to his post in the summer of 1942 and announced a new goal for the committee. “Our Guides are very slow in appearing,” he wrote. “Hence I have been led to the conviction that it would be very desirable to establish a quarterly publication called Mathematical Tables” in order to circulate the committee’s bibliographies and reports.6 The proposal surprised the members of the National Research Council. It would “be like issuing a professional journal,” complained the permanent secretary.7 After the argument over the $61.73, the council members were uncomfortable with the idea and tentatively tried to check Archibald. They approached Warren Weaver, in his role with the Rockefeller Foundation, and asked if the money granted to Archibald by the foundation could be used to finance a publication. Weaver confessed that he had a “certain horror” at being associated with Archibald’s idea, but he also stated that the Rockefeller Foundation would not stop the new periodical.8 The members of the MTAC committee, from L. J. Comrie to Charlotte Krampe, were slower to respond, but they generally liked the proposal. Wallace Eckert wrote that the periodical “would serve a very useful purpose” but warned that it “would probably become a financial headache” and that the “present is not the most auspicious time to start it.”9

  Never one to wait for favorable times, Archibald pressed ahead, leaving even the most sympathetic members of his committee behind. “With the load I have to carry,” he wrote to the MTAC committee, “I can not possibly undertake either to discuss everything with you before hand or send all copy to you before publication.”10 He completed the first issue of the journal, entitled Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation, in February 1943. To his credit, he recognized that the journal could not flourish if he was the sole contributor and apologized to his readers, “R. C. A. greatly regrets the apparent necessity for numerous personal contributions in this issue, as well as in the second.”11 The issue contained a great deal of useful information, including lists of tables, errata, book reviews, and articles on methods of calculation. The only thing that seemed out of place was a piece devoted to the computing machines of the seventeenth century, a favorite subject of Archibald’s.

  Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation provided American computers with the first systematic reports on computing activities. Before the journal reached a wide audience, many computers did not know what organizations existed and what work was being done. In early February 1943, the members of a new computing group at the University of Pennsylvania did not know how they might contact the Mathematical Tables Project. One of the group’s leaders, John Brainerd (1904–1988), sent a letter to the project sponsor, Lyman Briggs at the National Bureau of Standards. Brainerd explained that he was undertaking a large computing effort for the Aberdeen Proving Ground and was searching for human computers and computing expertise. He hoped that the Mathematical Tables Project was still operating and that it might provide him with human computers or handle some of his calculations or provide him with training materials.12 Brainerd needed especially sophisticated computers, computers with a good background in mathematics. The Mathematical Tables Project might have seemed an unlikely source of such computers, but Gertrude Blanch had initiated an extensive training program in 1941. She and other members of the planning committee developed a series of eight mathematics courses, which they offered over the lunch hour. The first course discussed the properties of elementary arithmetic; the intermediate ones covered standard high school algebra, trigonometry, and college calculus; the final course presented the methods of the planning committee: matrix calculations, the theory of differences, and special functions. The teachers treated the courses as a formal school, requiring the students to attend every session and asking them to “do a reasonable amount of ‘home work’ on their own time.”13

  Lyman Briggs replied to Brainerd’s letter just as the Mathematical Tables Project was preparing to move from its old WPA office to the rooms rented by the Applied Mathematics Panel. He explained to Brainerd that the project had found a home for the duration of the war and was able to accept out
side assignments. “I think you will be glad,” Brainerd told his colleagues, “to note the action which is being taken in connection with the computation project.”14 The enthusiasm of this initial contact quickly faded as the leaders of the two computing organizations employed different strategies in their work. Arnold Lowan, of the Mathematical Tables Project, was a classical physicist who understood the rules of divided labor. For him, computing machinery was an aid that “facilitated and abridged” the efforts of his staff. Brainerd was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He organized his office around a large computing machine, a differential analyzer, and used human labor to compensate for the machine’s shortcomings. Brainerd’s computers were machine operators, as George Stibitz had prophesied, but these operators were not mere drudges, for they needed a thorough mathematical education in order to do their work.

  In 1937, the University of Pennsylvania had acquired a differential analyzer in conjunction with the Aberdeen Proving Ground. The proving ground had financed the differential analyzer under an agreement that allowed ballistics researchers to use this machine in times of war. Until the spring of 1942, the analyzer had been used by engineering professors and graduate students. Like most university research equipment, this machine received regular but intermittent use. Four or five times a term, it would calculate a curve associated with some electrical component or circuit. Occasionally, it would serve as the object of an experiment by a graduate student interested in electromechanical controls. Once or twice a year, the university was able to rent the device to a local company. For other periods, the machine stood idle, gathering dust and dripping oil.15