When Computers Were Human (16 page)

The Harvard Observatory has left an unusual document that suggests the daily routine of its computing staff and the challenges faced by the female computers. This document is a musical parody, entitled the
Observatory Pinafore
, based on W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's operetta
H. M. S. Pinafore
. The parody was written by a junior astronomer, Winslow Upton (1853–1914), and so reflects the point of view of the astronomers, not the computers. It shows the women struggling with their work, confronting astronomers with problems, and working in an environment that would constrain their role or even deny that they were part of a scientific endeavor.

The
Observatory Pinafore
must be one of the first parodies of Gilbert and Sullivan's opera, a show that has been adapted and modified many times. Winslow Upton probably saw the original
H. M. S. Pinafore
during its American premier in November 1878. This production, unauthorized by Gilbert and Sullivan, debuted in the old Boston Museum of Art six months after the show opened in London. Upton acquired a copy of the vocal score and wrote his observatory version nine months later “during four rainy days of an August vacation in Vermont.”
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He replaced the opening chorus of sailors, who tell of their shipboard life, with a chorus of computers, who sing:

The song is in the same spirit as the original and suggests that Upton is going to follow Gilbert and Sullivan's original plot. In
H. M. S. Pinafore
, a young sailor is in love with the daughter of his captain. Prevented from
marrying by the social gulf between them, the two spend much of the opera planning to elope. “Love levels all ranks,” says one character, “but not so much as that.” The show is filled with trios and dances, a silly song by a pompous bass singer, a touching lover's lament for the soprano, and a rousing chorus expressing English superiority. Near the end, one character announces, much to everyone's surprise, that the captain and the young sailor were switched at birth, an announcement that immediately elevates the sailor and allows him to wed his love. The other characters gleefully ignore the logical problems with this solution, notably that the young sailor is now old enough to be the father of his bride, and sing a rousing recap of the songs.

Upton could have chosen to adapt Gilbert's plot to the Harvard Observatory. He might have decided to have a young female computer, perhaps a recent graduate of Cambridge Girls' High School, fall in love with an assistant astronomer who is a member of a prominent Beacon Hill family. After two acts of rewritten dances, solos, and choruses, we might discover that there was a mix-up in the two families which, after an extended lawsuit, reverses the fortunes of the two young people and allows them to marry. However, Upton did not follow this approach, as he was not interested in exploring the relations between men and women. Instead, he chose to explore the love between a young man and his science, the love that a junior astronomer had for his position at the Harvard Observatory.

In the
Observatory Pinafore
, Upton recasts the female love interest as a young male astronomer, though he retains the female name “Josephine” from the original.
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The male Josephine is about to lose his position at Harvard. With no other positions available, he intends to take a job at an inferior private observatory in Rhode Island. Upton expresses nothing but scorn for the Rhode Island observatory. It is the hobby of a wealthy businessman, and hence it is tainted, less virtuous than the Harvard facility. The script portrays the businessman and the director of his observatory as vain and stupid. “I'm very proud of my degree,” sings the Rhode Island astronomer, “For it shows that I'm a man of extraordinary sense.”
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As the plot moves through its paces, the Josephine astronomer bemoans his departure from Harvard and eventually finds a way to demonstrate his astronomical skill by repairing a telescope. When he fixes the device, his value is recognized, and he is allowed to remain in Cambridge.

The only computer identified by name in the
Observatory Pinafore
is Rhoda Saunders. She may have been chosen because of her role in the observatory, because she was a friend of Winslow Upton, or because she possessed the best voice among the female employees. The script suggests that she was strong and confident of her skills. In a scene which has no
parallel in the original Gilbert and Sullivan play, she defends her work to an agitated assistant astronomer. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! It's all wrong! A fearful mistake!” exclaims the astronomer, who has just been looking at a sheet of reduced data. When the figures are identified as the work of Saunders, she quickly affirms, “I don't believe it's wrong.”
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The observer eventually calms down and agrees with her. As the script was intended to entertain the staff of the Harvard Observatory, this scene is probably an exaggerated version of a real event, though it gives us no real assessment of Saunders's character. She may have been strong and outgoing or quiet and retiring. Even if it could give us a fuller picture of Saunders, it would be of little use, for the scene is one of the last times that a computer appears in the original script. By the end of the first act, the female computers all but disappear from the show.

Though Upton changed the gender of the female romantic lead and gave most of her songs to a man, he was not such a fool as to give the best soprano song to a male voice. He assigns the lover's lament, the song “Sorry her lot,” to Rhoda Saunders and uses it to express some of the frustrations of the computers. In the original opera, this song is one of the points where Arthur Sullivan's music transcends the comedy of Gilbert's words and expresses a few moments of honest human emotion. It is stately, with a delicate melody that falls from high notes to low. In
H. M. S. Pinafore
, the falling melody is a fall of resignation, a recognition that love may be eternal but that courtship and marriage are governed by the conventions of society. “Weary the heart that bows the head,” she sings in the last verse, “When love is alive and hope is dead.”

Upton's version of the aria nearly matches the language of the original. It is his best writing in the entire script. Saunders, the computer who had held her own against the charges of an assistant observer, sings of repetition, tedium, and self-doubt.

To those unversed in arithmetic, computing was indeed a difficult task, but Saunders was a good computer and served at the observatory for thirteen years. She, as well as the entire staff, had known the times when fatigue made any mental labor difficult. Under such circumstances, computers could barely add a column of figures and would make error after error in the simplest of calculations. Upton underscores the problem of fatigue by contrasting the computers, who work during the day, against the observers, who work at night.

The sweet sleep is only a brief respite from their days of toil. Upton reinforces the tedium of the work through the chorus:

The computers used red ink to correct their mistakes. A page of red figures meant the day had been hard and frustrating.

Once the song is finished, Saunders has only a few more lines in the script about mistakes and red ink before her role is finished and she leaves the stage. Just before she departs, there is a brief exchange that suggests the anxieties created by the presence of women at the observatory. The Rhode Island astronomer asks Pickering about the size of the computing staff. Pickering replies that it is “quite large—most enough for a good dance in spare hours.” After hearing this, the other astronomer exclaims, “Do you allow, sir, your assistants to dance? Physicians tell me it is promotive of inaccuracy in computation.” To modern sensibilities, this response is a quaint remnant of Victorian superstition, but it actually expresses a deep anxiety of the times. No one was entirely confident that men and women who were unrelated by family ties could work together in offices without being influenced by physical attraction. Taken at face value, the script suggests that E. C. Pickering may not have thought about this question, for the observatory captain responds, “Indeed! I was not aware of that.”
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However, it seems likely that Upton is being ironic, for Pickering was comfortable with the presence of women in his observatory, while the leaders of the Naval Observatory and the Nautical Almanac were not.

In 1880, shortly after Winslow Upton had finished the
Observatory Pinafore
, the director of the real Harvard Observatory, E. C. Pickering, announced that “a handsome carpet has also been purchased for the Computing Room in the east wing.”
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It was a pleasant addition to the room, for it deadened excess noise and provided a layer of insulation against the frozen ground of the Massachusetts winter. Pickering undoubtedly purchased it with all goodwill, yet the carpet was also a symbol of divided labor, of tasks for men and women. The literature of the time talks of separate spheres for the two genders, a metaphor that borrows from the classical model of astronomy. The sphere of Mars encircles the sphere of Venus, but both spin on the same axis. Men could move freely
through the observatory, even into the telescope room, “a dark and dingy place,” Upton tells us, “all clattered up and smelling strong of oil.”
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The women had their computing room, with its desks and its carpet.

The Harvard Observatory marks the end of experiments with dividing the labor of computation. Subsequent computing offices draw their models, consciously or unconsciously, from the laboratories that were founded before 1880. The Harvard Observatory also marks the end of astronomy as the dominant force in scientific calculation. Indeed, the
Observatory Pinafore
makes it clear that orbits and positions are no longer the most interesting part of astronomical research. Upton's writing transforms the rousing chorus of British superiority at the end of the play into a song of praise for a photometer, an instrument that measures the brightness of stars.
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PART II

Mass Production and New Fields of Science 1880–1930

CHAPTER SIX

Looking Forward, Looking Backward: Machinery 1893

O
N A TYPICAL WORKDAY
in 1881 or 1882, Rhoda Saunders would begin her calculations in the Harvard Observatory computing room by picking up her pen, uncorking her bottles of ink, one black and one red, and opening her computing book. All of these objects would have been familiar to Edmund Halley in the seventeenth century or Nicole-Reine Lepaute in the eighteenth, but each had been subtly changed by industrialization. Saunders's pen had a preformed steel nib that easily outlasted the hand-cut point of a goose quill. Her bottles of ink were commercially produced and varied little from batch to batch. The lines in her computing book, printed by a mechanical press, were straight and true, without any of the wiggles or cramped margins found on the hand-ruled sheets of Nevil Maskelyne or Maria Mitchell.

The uniformity that could be found in Saunders's mass-produced writing implements could also be found in a new generation of computing tools. The slide rule, which became popular in the United States during the 1880s, was a mass-produced version of a 1622 invention.
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The original slide rule had been created by the English mathematician William Oughtred (1574–1660), who used the concept of logarithms. Logarithms were a new discovery in the early seventeenth century. They are special values that converted multiplication into addition. For any number, a mathematician could find a corresponding logarithm. For example, the logarithm of 2 is .3010, while the logarithm of 3 is .4772.
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By adding the two logarithms, we get .7782, which is the logarithm of 6, the product of 2 and 3. Oughtred created his rule by inscribing two rods with logarithmic scales that resembled the scales of an ordinary ruler, except that the space between numbers grew smaller and smaller as the values increased. By sliding these two rods, Oughtred could add two logarithms or, equivalently, multiply two numbers.

The slide rules of Oughtred and other seventeenth-century scientists were expensive, hand-crafted devices, each one designed for a specific kind of problem. Isaac Newton created a rule with three slides that could be used to solve cubic equations. England's first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed (1646–1720), purchased a special rule for astronomical calculation.
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Only with the invention of precision ruling machines that could cut logarithmic scales did these rules become common. These machines started appearing in the early nineteenth century. By 1833, slide rules were so inexpensive that Gaspard Riche de Prony could report that Parisians are “commonly using ‘sliding rules' at all levels, including shop keepers and artisans.”
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