When Computers Were Human (28 page)

The armistice released a tremendous mathematical energy on both sides of the Atlantic. Less than twenty-four hours after the firing stopped, the American army began to terminate ballistics experiments and demobilize the computers at Aberdeen. “On November 12, the telegraph wires fairly hummed with cancellation orders emanating from Washington,” wrote historian David Kennedy. “Within a month, the [ordnance] department had unburdened itself of $2.5 billion of [weapons contracts].”
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The Aberdeen computers felt the impact of these cancellations in less than three weeks. The number of test firings peaked on November 26, the busiest day of the war, and quickly began to decline.
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The proving ground released the first computers in early December as it began to conclude ballistics experiments and range table production. When the computers looked for jobs as civilians, they looked for positions as mathematicians rather than in fields related to ballistics or computation. “For many years after the First World War,” recalled mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), “the overwhelming majority of significant American mathematicians was to be found among those who had gone through the discipline of the Proving Ground.”
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Wiener's observation probably exaggerated the influence of the forty-two mathematicians who served with Veblen and Moulton, but it suggests the reputation that this group had acquired in the weeks and months after the end of the fighting. Most of the proving ground computers, including Wiener, were able to use their war experience to advance their careers. Shortly after leaving Aberdeen, Wiener was offered a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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The female computers, the women of the Experimental Ballistics Office in Washington, had fewer opportunities than their male counterparts. None of them held advanced degrees in advanced mathematics, and hence they were not qualified for the few positions that were open to women at the nation's universities and colleges. Some hoped to find positions as computers, but they soon found that computing jobs declined in times of peace, and again, these jobs went to men first. Elizabeth Webb Wilson, perhaps the most ambitious of the group, tried to find a computing job in Washington, D.C. One of the ballistics officers described her as looking for “employment in which her somewhat exceptional preparation can be made useful in the national service.”
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She was no less aggressive in attempting to use her war record than the men, but she could not insist upon a job that made full use of her mathematical talents, as she had in March 1918. After a year of unemployment, she became a high school mathematics teacher in Washington.
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22. Final picture of army ballistics computers in Washington, D.C.

The task of closing the army computing offices fell to Oswald Veblen. At the exact moment of the armistice, he was with the American Expeditionary Force in France.
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Anticipating the end of the war, the army had sent him to inspect the ballistics facilities of Britain, Italy, and France before they were disbanded. He packed his bags with the latest calculations from the proving ground to give to the artillery command in France. He also took a new tuxedo, in case he was invited to any formal parties when abroad.
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During his trip, he took every opportunity to meet with European mathematicians. He visited Cambridge in England, the École Polytechnique in France, and the University of Rome in Italy.
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He returned to the United States in March and relieved Forest Ray Moulton at the Washington Ballistics Office. For the next six weeks, he prepared reports, summarized experiments, secured office records, and demobilized the few remaining computers.
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With the experimental program coming to a close, he had time to attend the opera, take long walks through the city, and make plans for the future of American mathematics. “Range tables are not being worked on to any extent nowadays,” was the final word from Aberdeen.
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The armistice allowed Karl Pearson to reclaim the leadership of organized computation. He had withdrawn from ballistics computations six months before the end of the war and a full year before Oswald Veblen resigned his commission. He spent the spring and summer retrenching, a
metaphor borrowed from the front lines in France. He hired new computers, evaluated the state of his laboratory, and started on a new plan of research. In many ways, the war clung to him longer than it touched the lives of the computers at Aberdeen or at Washington. On a visit to his country house, he wrote a long, elegiac memoir of his time during the conflict. He confessed to having become sensitive to the sound of thunder and associating the smell of pumpernickel bread with the odor of explosives. “I want instinctively to whinny like the dogs, if there be a sudden clap of thunder, and will-power has still to be exercised to avoid it.”
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Armistice Day found Pearson sitting in a hospital recovery room next to the bed of Leslie John Comrie (1893–1950). Between the two of them was a Brunsviga calculator. Pearson was explaining the finer points of machine calculation, while Comrie was asking how certain problems might be handled by the device. L. J. Comrie, as he preferred to be called, had been a late recruit for the war. He was part of a New Zealand regiment that had been assembled to replace troops from the home island. He had studied chemistry at the University of Aukland before joining the army, but he had a deep love of astronomy and a special affection for the classical problems of positional astronomy. As his troop ship steamed across the Indian Ocean, he had occupied himself by tracking the ship's course. In ordinary circumstances, it would have been a harmless diversion, but in time of war, when troop movements were secret, it defied military discipline and could have earned him a court-martial. He arrived in France, either undiscovered or forgiven, only to meet with one of the many meaningless events of the war. A munitions accident badly wounded him and forced the army surgeons to amputate one of his legs. While he convalesced in London, volunteer nurses visited him and asked if he would like to be trained for some trade or occupation that might be suited for the handicapped. Comrie replied that he would much prefer to continue his university education and become an astronomer. This conversation made its way to Pearson, who was always looking for potential computers. Brunsviga in hand, he found his way to Comrie's hospital ward, where the two began a friendship over computation.
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Pearson and Comrie had little in common beyond their mutual ambitions and their love of numbers. Pearson was an imperious man, a scientist who could speak from the mountaintop of his grand visions and his mathematical methods of proof. His biographer wrote of Pearson's “fierce intellectuality and disposition to theorize about everything from religious faith to sexual love.”
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Comrie was a scrapper, always impatient to show that he was no one's inferior. Once his health had recovered sufficiently, he started working in the Galton Laboratory, now the formal name for the office that Pearson had started as the Biometrics Laboratory. His heart was not in the study of mathematical statistics, and he certainly
did not share Pearson's infatuation with the Brunsviga calculator, but the laboratory gave a focus to his life while he prepared for the future. In all, he spent nine months with Pearson before a scholarship for New Zealand veterans allowed him to depart for Cambridge University and the study of astronomy.

23. L. J. Comrie at calculator

During Comrie's term at the Galton Laboratory, Pearson brought his computing staff back to full strength and began a new round of statistical
research. Either through Comrie's influence or from his observations of the scientific world, Pearson realized that he had become one of the world's experts on scientific computation. As he labored to train new workers, Pearson was “struck by the absence of any simple text-book for the use of computers and still more by the absence of obviously necessary auxiliary tables.”
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Before the First World War computing had been a craft skill, a loosely organized body of techniques that were passed from generation to generation like the skills of a carpenter or the knowledge of a butcher. One generation of computers had learned their techniques from Nevil Maskelyne. Another from Benjamin Peirce. A third from Myrrick Doolittle. At that juncture, Pearson realized that a new generation was learning their methods from him.

Pearson proposed to codify the methods of computation in a series of pamphlets, entitled
Tracts for Computers
, which would provide solutions for most “practical difficulties of the computer.” The name may have been inspired by the Edinburgh Mathematics Laboratory, which had published a series of tracts on the theory of numerical methods. If Pearson borrowed the title, he did not borrow the goal of the Edinburgh series. He intended that his tracts would present practical lessons, such lessons “as we have met with [in] our own experience.”
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With these lessons, a computer could develop a computing plan for any kind of numerical problem. Of all the computers of the First World War, the staff of the Galton Laboratory had handled the largest variety of problems. They had reduced data and computed ephemerides for the University of London astronomical laboratory. They had tabulated census data for the government and handled statistical correlations for Pearson. For the Munitions Ministry, they had computed trajectories and adjusted surveys. This expertise had been scattered during the last months of the war, but Pearson remained in contact with many of the computers who had served with him and could recruit a substantial pool of talent to prepare the
Tracts
.

In all, the friends and staff of the Galton Laboratory completed twenty-six pamphlets. L. J. Comrie wrote one of them, and Pearson prepared two of the
Tracts
. Pearson's contributions dealt with the techniques of interpolation, the process of filling in the points between two existing values. Pearson had hoped that most of the tracts might deal with similar methods, but he was only able to publish four booklets on such subjects, including the two that he contributed. The other two methodological pamphlets dealt with mechanical quadratures, or the method of small arcs, and the technique of smoothing, the mathematical means for drawing a simple curve through clouds of data.
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In one pamphlet Pearson tried to catalog the available literature of computation. Tables and notes on computation could be found in the
books and journals of at least a half dozen fields, far more than an ordinary computer could follow. He asked a colleague to prepare a bibliography of logarithm tables by reviewing the literature of physics, astronomy, optics, surveying, and engineering. Pearson claimed that scientists regularly asked him for a bibliography of tables, but he did not seem fully committed to this kind of research. In the preface to the bibliography he asked, “Has [the author] adequately supplied an admitted want?” His reply was not especially confident. “I hope it may be so,” he wrote, “but only the critics, present and future, can provide a satisfactory reply.”
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Comrie's tract was a table of tangents and logarithms. In all, twenty-one of the twenty-six pamphlets were mathematical tables, far more than Pearson probably intended. He claimed that these tables had “special value to the practical computer,”
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but they were an odd collection of special functions, sampling numbers, and probabilities. Many of these were originally computed during the war “because the required tables [had] not yet been published to the necessary numbers of figures, or because we did not know, or still do not know, if such tables were ever computed.”
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The Galton Laboratory computers prepared these tables for publication by checking the original text for errors, proofreading the typeset table, and preparing an introduction. The introduction often proved to be the most valuable part of the tract, for it described the mathematics behind the table and showed how the values might be employed.