When Computers Were Human (26 page)

By all accounts, Siacci's theory continued to work fairly well for short- and intermediate-range artillery, but events in the first years of the war had shown that it failed dramatically in long-range artillery and high-angle mortar attacks, in addition to its shortcomings for antiaircraft fire, bombing, and fire from aircraft. While the staff would be able to correct some of these deficiencies, Moulton concluded that he should develop a new, comprehensive ballistics theory that could be used to analyze any circumstance. The work engaged the computing staffs in both Aberdeen and Washington and challenged them to use the most sophisticated mathematical concepts at their disposal. Moulton created the central outline of the theory. Other mathematicians handled specific problems with the
theory, such as adjustments for altitude, the spinning of the projectile, or the rotation of the earth. Elizabeth Webb Wilson, who helped prepare the tables for the theory, recalled discovering that “the Germans had the advantage because the earth turned toward the east, therefore as they were shooting toward the west, their bullets carried further into the allies' lines.”
⁷⁰

The computers were mathematicians, not ordnance engineers, and were most interested in the mathematics of Moulton's ballistics theory. One computer, ignoring the advantages to the gunnery crew, recalled how the work “made a brilliant use of the new theory of functionals,”
⁷¹
a concept that was then on the frontier of mathematical research. Isolated from friends and family, separated by an ocean from the dangers of war, the computing staff at Aberdeen lived the life of extended adolescence. They hiked through the countryside and conducted unauthorized, and probably unscientific, experiments with TNT and smokeless powder. From the collected scraps and rubble of ordnance experiments, they invented surreal versions of checkers and chess. At night they would gather in the computing shack, play cards, and do the things that young men do when they are at war, though perhaps they were unique in calculating their winnings and loses on adding machines which by day computed the trajectories of shells. After the cards were dealt, the conversations would wane as the players computed the probabilities that their opponents held winning hands. When they spoke, they talked not of lost opportunities or of distant family members, but of the mathematics that they loved and the theorems that they would prove.
⁷²
One computer wrote that the experience “furnished a certain equivalent to that cloistered but enthusiastic intellectual life which I had previously experienced at the English Cambridge.”
⁷³

The trenches in France had their own intellectual life, at least for the English troops. “The efficiency of the postal service made books as common at the front as parcels from Fortnum and Mason's,” wrote critic Paul Fussell, “and the prevailing boredom of the static tactical situation … assured that they were read as in no other war.”
⁷⁴
For the scientists at the front, there were opportunities to observe and speculate. The English meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953) found that many of his days were uninterrupted by combat or even by rumors of combat. The battles most often occurred at sunrise or sunset, when one side or the other was shielded by the glare from the low-lying sun. He served as an ambulance driver and had little responsibility beyond the work of caring for his vehicle. During the quiet hours, he worked at his science, theorizing about the movement of the winds, the distribution of humidity, the impact of the light from the sun. “My office was a heap of hay in a cold
rest billet,” he recalled. His approach to the problem was not a statistical method, like that used by the U.S. Weather Service in the 1870s, but a differential equation model that had much in common with the mathematics of astronomy and ballistics.
⁷⁵

Richardson described his analysis of the weather as “a scheme of weather prediction, which resembles the process by which the
Nautical Almanac
is produced.”
⁷⁶
He derived a series of differential equations that described how the weather changed moment by moment. These equations tracked seven basic properties of the atmosphere: its movement (in three dimensions), density, pressure, humidity, and temperature. The computing plan for these equations divided the globe into “a special pattern like that of a chessboard,” a grid of longitude and latitude lines that marked 2,000 points where the weather would be computed in increments of three hours. “It took me the best part of six weeks to draw up the computing forms,” he recorded, and when he attempted the calculations, he discovered that he required an equal amount of time to calculate a single advance of the weather at one of the points. His duties at the front had prevented him from fully concentrating on the arithmetic, and at one point, he had misplaced his manuscript. “During the battle of Champagne in April 1917,” he recalled, “the working copy was sent to the rear, where it became lost, to be re-discovered some months later under a heap of coal.”
⁷⁷
When he finished the calculations, he concluded that “with practice, the work of an average computer might go, perhaps, ten times faster.” From this one exercise, his little respite from the war, he concluded that it would require 32 computers to keep pace with the weather at one grid point, 32 computers to complete a single three-hour prediction in exactly three hours. As there were 2,000 points in his scheme, he would require total of 64,000 human computers to track the weather for the entire globe.
⁷⁸

“After so much hard reasoning,” Richardson asked, “may one play with a fantasy?” He had not come to France in search of glory. He was a Quaker and a conscientious objector to war. Rather than serve in the military, he had chosen to drive an ambulance. His fantasy was a world where the soldiers massed on the Western Front were put to work reproducing the earth's weather in numbers. He would take 64,000 soldiers from the front lines and make them computers in a giant spherical computing room, a room that would have been larger than any sports stadium of Richardson's day. The internal “walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe,” he wrote. The North Pole would be on the ceiling, while Antarctica would be marked on the floor. England would be found three-quarters of the way toward the top, its shape nearly hidden by one of the many balconies that ringed the inside of the room. Upon these balconies, Richardson imagined, “a myriad computers
are at work upon the weather of the part of the map where each sits.” He suggested that the computers might work on large sheets of paper and then display their results on “numerous little night signs” so that others could read them.
⁷⁹

The calculations would be directed by a senior computer, a scientist who had worked through every step of the mathematics. This computer would stand on the top of a tall and slender column that rose from the floor like the column for Admiral Nelson in Trafalgar Square or a tall skyscraper in a city of lesser office buildings. “Surrounded by several assistants and messengers,” the senior computer would “maintain a uniform speed of progress in all parts of the globe.” Richardson suggested that this computer “is like the conductor of an orchestra, in which the instruments are slide-rules and calculating machines.” In his scheme, the conductor's baton was replaced by a pair of colored spotlights. The computer would turn “a beam of rosy light upon any region that is running ahead of the rest, and a beam of blue light upon those who are behindhand.” Outside of the computing room, the computer oversaw a scientific compound, which included a radio station to transmit the weather predictions, a secure storeroom to hold old computing sheets, and a building that held “all the usual financial, correspondence and administrative offices.” Next to the sphere was a training room and a research lab, as “there is much experimenting on a small scale before any change is made in the complex routine of the computing theatre.” Richardson's weather compound ended at the border of Arcadia, the land where numbers stood for things of nature, rather than the flight of artillery shells, the output of a factory, or the commerce of men. “Outside are playing fields, houses, mountains and lakes,” wrote Richardson at the end of his fantasy, “for it was thought that those who compute the weather should breathe of it freely.”
⁸⁰

The fantasy of a giant computing laboratory was, perhaps, not so unrealistic to those who served on the battlefields or carried the wounded to safety. During his three years with the ambulance corps, Richardson saw hundreds of miles of trenches that were filled with thousands and thousands of soldiers. All he had imagined was the simple act of winding those trenches into a ball and using their occupants for the peaceful end of computing the weather. However, in 1918, weather did not represent the same kind of threat as the German army, so that no government had any interest in building a laboratory for 64,000 computers, 6,400 computers, or even 640 computers. Only one facility approached Richardson's vision of a computing compound with houses and lakes and trees. It employed but forty-two computers and was located in a Maryland town named Aberdeen.

CHAPTER TEN

War Production

B
Y THE SUMMER OF
1918, the whole European war seemed to be packed into the city of Washington, D.C., an area barely ten miles on a side. The army tested ordnance in the city's northwest quadrant while the navy built guns in the southeast. Residents rented any available room to the new war workers who arrived each day by train. Downtown, entire government bureaus were squeezed into offices that once had held three employees, or two, or even just one. Outside, construction crews labored to create new buildings on the one large, unoccupied piece of land in the center of the city: the parklands of the Washington mall. Watching all of this activity from his office, the director of the army's Department of Ballistics concluded that the government needed nothing so much as time, “time to build manufacturing capacity on a grand scale without the hampering necessity for immediate production; time to secure the best in design; time to attain quality in enormous output to come later as opposed to early quantity of indifferent design.”
¹
For those who worked in Washington, the war was a problem of production more than it was a problem of military strategy. The offices in the city had to clothe, equip, and feed the members of the American Expeditionary Force. They had to transport every soldier to the front, provide the forces with weapons and medical care, and return each veteran to the United States. The tools of their war were typewriters, forms in triplicate, adding machines, accounting sheets, and statistics. For many a government manager, the most powerful machine was the punched card tabulator. “Calculators … went to war,” wrote historian James Cortada, “but the dramatic examples of data processing at work were punched card gear.”
²

The tabulator of 1918 was substantially more sophisticated than the simple counting machine of 1890. Following the success of his first census, Herman Hollerith had created a tabulator that could add numbers and accumulate sums. He devised a method for representing numbers as holes in a card. A number was punched into the card one digit at a time, with the location of each hole representing the value of the digit. According
to historian Emerson Pugh, Hollerith created this tabulator in order to sell his machines to the railroad companies. “His primary target was the New York Central, which had become the second largest railroad system in the United States.” He promoted the tabulators as a tool for processing waybills, the paperwork that followed the movement of freight.
³
He also found a ready market for the new adding tabulators within the United States Census Bureau. In 1900 and 1910, the Census Office had used the tabulators to gather agricultural statistics. Such a process was beyond the ability of the original tabulators, as it required the machines to sum the number of cultivated acres in each township, the total cattle in each county, and the bushels of grain produced in each state.
⁴

The 1910 census had been the last for Herman Hollerith. In 1911, Hollerith sold his company to a syndicate of investors, who merged the company with two other firms to create the Computing, Tabulating and Recording Company, or CTR. The president of this new company was Thomas J. Watson (1874–1956), who had made his reputation as a salesman for the National Cash Register Company. Watson saw a great future in punched cards and worked to find new markets for the equipment in manufacturing, banking, retail, and government.
⁵
When the United States went to war in 1917, he was ready to provide tabulating gear to any government division that needed to prepare statistics, to direct military operations, or to manage war production.
⁶
With CTR tabulators, the United States government created nearly a dozen new computing offices during the war, each office with a production capacity that rivaled the abilities of the Census Bureau. All of these offices were associated with temporary agencies that managed the wartime economy, and all of them processed substantial amounts of statistical data. The largest of these offices was part of the War Industries Board, the agency that oversaw American manufacturing. This board, under the direction of financier Bernard Baruch, worked to provide the American Expeditionary Force with all the equipment it needed while, at the same time, ensuring that the civilian economy had an adequate supply of goods and services.

The agriculture production board, known as the Food Administration, was directed by Herbert Hoover (1874–1964). Hoover was then known as a successful mining engineer and the chair of a committee that had successfully brought food relief to Belgium. Hoover faced one of the most complex managerial tasks of the war. The country had hundreds of thousands of food producers, ranging from the kitchen gardens of housewives to the massive plants of the meatpackers. As Hoover started assembling his staff in one of the new buildings on the mall, he recognized that the United States government had only a vague understanding of how producers and processors delivered food to the American market and what
resources might be redirected to the war effort without causing undue hardship at home. The government's principal research office on food distribution, the Bureau of Markets, had been created only four years before by the United States Department of Agriculture. Hoover moved quickly to form a comprehensive statistics office and appointed as its director Raymond Pearl (1879–1940).