When Computers Were Human (32 page)

In 1925, the Mathematical Tables Committee was the only professional organization for human computers. It was dominated by the colleagues of Karl Pearson and the students of Pearson's Galton Laboratory.
⁵⁶
The committee invited L. J. Comrie to join their group in 1928, and Comrie eagerly accepted the appointment. He was “a persistent self-publicist,” wrote historian Mary Croarken, and “saw the [Mathematical Tables Committee] as a means to improve his standing in the wider scientific community.”
⁵⁷
Within a year, Comrie had established himself as the leader of the group, even though he officially served the committee as its secretary rather than as its chair. He arranged for the Mathematical Tables Committee to have space in the offices of the Royal Astronomical Society, established a regular schedule of meetings, and outlined an ambitious computing program for the group. Under his urging, the committee agreed to prepare and publish volumes of tables.
⁵⁸

The Mathematical Tables Committee had few resources to support its work, but it had two small legacies, which had been left to the committee by former members. The constraints on these legacies specified that the money should be used to compute certain kinds of tables. Comrie was not especially interested in those tables and chose to interpret the legacy requirements liberally. He used the money to purchase a National Accounting
Machine and two Brunsviga calculators, reasoning that these machines could be used to prepare the specified tables. Once the legacy tables were complete, he turned to other problems that he thought more worthwhile.
⁵⁹
He kept the new machines at the offices of the
Nautical Almanac
, even though they were not the property of the British government. In itself, this decision was unremarkable, as the almanac staff included some of the most skilled computers in the country, and Comrie was an acknowledged expert on computing machines. Yet, in combining the resources of the two organizations, he did not always differentiate where the production of the
Nautical Almanac
ended and the work for the Mathematical Tables Committee began. Sometimes the National Accounting Machine prepared tables for the almanac. At other times, the almanac computers helped Comrie prepare tables for the Mathematical Tables Committee. On at least one occasion, the group did some calculations for Karl Pearson, who was affiliated with neither organization.
⁶⁰

By 1930, L. J. Comrie had climbed the central pillar of British scientific calculation and taken his place as the country's senior computer, the superintendent of the British
Nautical Almanac
. He directed a staff of about a dozen that used Brunsviga calculators and the National Accounting Machine. His elevation occurred as he was completing a first book of tables for the Mathematical Tables Committee, “a most admirable volume,” in the opinion of one reviewer, “which ought to be in every college mathematical library.”
⁶¹
Like Howard Tolley and Henry A. Wallace, he foresaw a grand future for computing, but the contemporary English landscape was less impressive. Outside of the Nautical Almanac Office could be found the London stock market, whose members had fallen into hard times as the price of corporate shares had fallen At the edge of the city there were factories, gates closed and windows shuttered. Men and women walked the streets looking for a job, a handout, a scrap of food. When the winds blew from the east, one could catch from across the channel the faint smell of mustard gas, the lingering scent of the old battles.

PART III

Professional Computers and an Independent Discipline 1930–1964

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Best of Bad Times

S
PRING
1930. It was the first vernal season of the Great Depression, though the economic collapse was not yet potent enough to touch the annual meeting of the National Research Council. The council was the visible symbol of the First World War's scientific legacy. Formed to coordinate research for the American military effort, it had grown in stature and influence during the 1920s. As part of the National Academy of Sciences, the council occupied a marble-clad building on the National Mall. The entrance to the building stood across the street from the memorial to Abraham Lincoln. Visitors to the facility passed through large, bronze doors into the building's solemn interior. The academy's central auditorium, which stood behind the foyer and the stairs to the executive offices, could be mistaken for the conclave of a mathematically inclined Masonic order. A high balcony of chairs circled the room, and the walls were decorated with allegorical mosaics based upon the symbols of science. The National Research Council, acting as the operating committee of the academy, was charged with the responsibility “of increasing knowledge, of strengthening the national defense, and of contributing in other ways to the public welfare.”
¹
In practice, this charge meant that the senior leadership of the council would identify outstanding scientific problems and appoint committees to report on those issues. That spring, the problems of the human computers appeared on the council's agenda when one member suggested that something should be done to consolidate the literature of calculation.

The proposal before the National Research Council was simple and straightforward. It would establish a committee to prepare a bibliography of the mathematical tables that had been published in scientific journals. There was, of course, no single literature of computation. Tables and articles on computation could be found in dozens of scholarly publications, including the
Astrophysical Journal
, the
Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Biometrika
, the
Journal of the Optical Society of America
, and the
Proceedings of the Royal Artillery Institution
.
In addition to a summary of these journals, the proposal asked for a report on “automatic calculating machines, harmonic analyzers,” and “special graphical device machines of all kinds.”
²
These devices were called, in the language of the day, “aids to computation,” hence this compilation would be prepared by a committee with the unwieldy name of the “Subcommittee on the Bibliography of Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation,” a title that would quickly be shortened to the initials “MTAC.”

“Was it Dr. Veblen who initiated this suggestion?” asked Floyd K. Richtmyer (1881–1939). Richtmyer, a professor from Cornell University and an officer of the council, had been asked to find someone who might organize the MTAC committee. Technically, the answer to his question was no, as the idea had been suggested by a consultant to the Nautical Almanac Office, but the proposed committee clearly bore the influence of Veblen and the Aberdeen veterans. One of Veblen's former assistants within the Army Ballistics Office, Gilbert Bliss from the University of Chicago, served on the National Research Council and championed the proposal. Veblen, though not the instigator of the idea, knew of the plan, approved of it, and suggested several individuals who might serve on the committee.
³

As Richtmyer sought a leader for this group, he received a letter from the director of the Yale Observatory, informing him that an English mathematician, misidentified as “Karl Pierson,” had already prepared a bibliography of tables. The letter reported that one volume of the work had already appeared—the pamphlet on logarithm tables that was published in the
Tracts for Computers
—and that this booklet was one “that astronomers, at least, have frequently used.”
⁴
Richtmyer replied that he was “much indebted” for the information. If Pearson had created a full bibliography, he felt that there would not be a need to create a new one, for “duplication of effort, particularly in a matter like this, is highly undesirable.”
⁵

After a quick review of Pearson's work, Richtmyer concluded that the
Tracts for Computers
was not a complete bibliography and that there was still plenty of work for the proposed MTAC committee. He then returned to the search for a committee chair. He had two candidates for the position, Thornton Fry of Bell Telephone Laboratories and Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
⁶
Of the two, Bush was the more intriguing choice. He had recently built a computing machine that could solve differential equations, the equations of planetary orbits, artillery trajectories, and electrical devices. His machine was called a “differential analyzer,” though many a commentator would note that it neither differentiated nor analyzed. It used spinning disks and rotating drive shafts to represent
mathematical quantities, and it solved differential equations with a technique that was analogous to the method that Andrew Crommelin had used to predict the return of Halley's comet in 1910. However, as the machine worked with motions and not with numbers, it recorded solutions as a graph drawn by a mechanical pen.
⁷

Bush's differential analyzer had received much attention from engineers and industrial scientists. The computing division of General Electric had taken an interest in the machine and had used it to do several computations.
⁸
However, after discussing the merits of Bush and his invention, Richtmyer concluded that the MIT professor was the wrong person to chair the MTAC committee. Bush was not much interested in mathematical tables, and the differential analyzer seemed to be a “special machine and is not likely to be available for general laboratory purposes.”
⁹
With Bush eliminated, Richtmyer turned to Thornton Fry and asked him to lead the group.

“I would like to cooperate if possible,” Fry responded, but “I think I had better get a clearer picture of just what this … will involve before agreeing to take it on.”
¹⁰
In part, he was being cautious, as American Telephone and Telegraph had first command on his loyalty, but he was also opening a negotiation, probing the National Research Council to determine what resources might be at his disposal if he agreed to prepare the bibliography of tables. Fundamentally, he did not like the idea of producing a bibliography and argued that it was only “the distasteful but necessary first step in a program of producing the numerical tables.” He especially disliked the second part of the committee charge, the review of computing machinery. Such a review, he complained, “would have to contain a certain amount of comparative criticism to which exception would undoubtedly be taken by every manufacturer whose product was adversely mentioned.”
¹¹

There “is no doubt that a very definite need exists for more complete mathematical tables of certain types,” Fry concluded. He suggested that the new committee should “map out the need [for new tables] and apportion the work to various people so as to avoid duplication and secure the maximum possible results from the effort expended.” He noted that there were many skilled computers who might contribute to such a National Research Council project. He could volunteer the services of Clara Froelich and the other staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Karl Pearson, though quite senior, might be willing to contribute. L. J. Comrie, at the British
Nautical Almanac
, would certainly be interested. Fry thought that he might be able to entice some contributions from Aberdeen veterans, such as A. A. Bennett (1888–1971). Bennett had served as the chief mathematical assistant to Forest Ray Moulton and had made substantial contributions to Moulton's revised theory of ballistics. He now held a position
at Brown University and was also a special consultant on computation to both the army and General Electric.
¹²
There were even some new faces that might lend their effort, such as Indiana University professor Harold T. Davis (1892–1974). After stating his vision, Fry indicated that he would be willing to chair the MTAC committee and produce a bibliography if “the committee in question shall carry forward some such program as that which I have outlined.”
¹³

Richtmyer was sympathetic to Fry's idea, as the National Research Council had undertaken similar cooperative activities in the past. During the 1920s, the council had sponsored a multivolume handbook of data for scientists and engineers. This project, called the
International Critical Tables of Numerical Data, Physics, Chemistry and Technology
, had been praised by scientists in the United States, Europe, and Japan, but it had proven to be an expensive undertaking. The publication had cost $177,000 even though all of the contributors had worked as volunteers. The funds had been donated by “those appreciating its importance and in a position to make the necessary investment,” as the National Research Council had no funds of its own. Two hundred and forty-four organizations had donated to the project, although the bulk of the money had come from a single source, the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
¹⁴
Richtmyer was confident that the council could find similar funds for Fry's project and asked the mathematician from Bell Telephone Laboratories to describe his idea more fully and prepare a budget for the project.
¹⁵

Fry, engaged in other activities at Bell Telephone Laboratories, delayed his reply for five months. As a consequence, he lost a moment of opportunity. By the time that he presented his plan, the council was feeling the full impact of the economic depression. Richtmyer told him that the National Research Council was “not at the moment in a position to finance a more ambitious program, desirable as such a program obviously is.” He asked Fry to consider producing only the bibliography, “in spite of the fact that this proposal falls far short of the plan which you outlined in your letters to me.”
¹⁶
However, events were moving too quickly. Before Fry could reply, the council withdrew the offer. Feeling awkward about conveying the news to Fry, Richtmyer struggled to find his words. “Partially on account of developments since we began to consider this project,” he wrote, “it may turn out that we shall not wish at the present time to form a committee even for the preparation of the Bibliography.”
¹⁷
Fry did not even bother to reply to this letter but stuffed it in his files.