When Computers Were Human (35 page)

The Columbia computing facility, originally known as the Columbia University Statistical Bureau, was the joint creation of a scholar and a business leader, Benjamin Wood (1892–1984), a professor at Columbia's education school, and Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines. Wood was a Texan, described by a biographer as a “towering and disciplined intellect against which sparks of imagination impinged with the force of ignition.”
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Watson was a salesman by training, enthusiastic yet focused, and strategic.
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The two met when Wood was
studying the Alpha and Beta intelligence tests, the exams that the army had used during the First World War to screen recruits. Wood had collected hundreds of tests as his raw data. Each of these tests was graded by hand, and the results were analyzed with correlation statistics. By his estimate, it cost him five dollars in labor to process each batch of tests.
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Thinking that there must be some way to grade the tests with a machine, Wood wrote to the presidents of ten companies, described his problem, and asked their assistance. Of the ten, only Thomas Watson responded. He had no solution to the problem, but he was intrigued with Wood's letter.
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29. Columbia University Statistical Bureau. Ben Wood (in dark suit) stands in the center

The story of the initial meeting between the professor and the businessman comes from Wood, who is not the most reliable witness. He liked to boast and would later attribute quotes to Watson that could not possibly have come from the leader of IBM.
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Wood stated that the two met in a downtown business club and that he began the meeting by flattering the IBM product line, telling Watson that the tabulators could “do marvelous things in science and education, civil service, government, logistics, military, aviation, astronomy, every science in the world.”
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No matter what Wood may have said, something in his presentation appealed
to Watson. Watson's son later wrote that the Columbia professor described a vision that was “music to the ears of a tabulating machine maker.”
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During the meeting, Watson offered to provide Wood with punched card equipment. As Wood would later recall, “two or three weeks later, or maybe one week later, two or three huge trucks arrived at my office” and delivered what he remembered as “every IBM machine they had.”
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Of course, the installation was not quite that easy. Wood had to get permission from his dean, find space on campus, install the equipment, and find a trained operator.

Wood outlined a grand vision for the tabulating machinery. “I was planning to make tests over the whole gamut of the curriculum,” he recalled. Wood provided Watson with a basic understanding of statistical calculation as employed by social scientists and suggested new equipment that might be useful in statistical research. He also worked with IBM engineers to create a progressive digiting machine that could automatically perform multiplication and helped IBM identify a mechanism that would score standardized tests. When called upon to give a speech or demonstrate his equipment or even write a letter of recommendation for Watson's teenage son, Wood was glad to comply.
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Perhaps his most important contribution was to admit into his laboratory a young astronomy professor named Wallace J. Eckert (1902–1971).
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Unlike social statistics, astronomical calculation was not a growing field, and unlike the boisterous Wood, Wallace Eckert was a “small and retiring man,” characterized by one IBM historian as “so soft-spoken that he was scarcely audible.”
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A Columbia graduate student went so far as to call him one of the “passé guys,” a scientist who looked to the past rather than anticipating the future.
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Passé or not, Eckert came to the laboratory wanting to see how the punched card machines could handle a classic and difficult calculation, the three-body problem. The specific version of the problem was the system involving the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon. Eckert had an unusually detailed analysis of the problem, which he had obtained from Yale professor Ernest W. Brown (1866–1938). Brown had extended his analysis beyond the three bodies of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun and included the tug from the giant planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune as well as the slosh of the Earth's oceans as they dragged behind the Moon. He had summarized this solution in a 660-page volume with 180 tables.
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With Brown's tables, a computer could determine the position of the Moon for any day and any time, but the labor was almost overwhelming. Writing from the British Nautical Almanac Office, L. J. Comrie complained that the task of preparing a lunar ephemeris from Brown's tables required “the continuous work of two skilled computers.”
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Comrie
transferred this calculation from human computers to the punched card equipment. This new approach to preparing an ephemeris required Comrie to think in terms of operations that were not obvious to the astronomical computer. He selected the tables he needed and punched them onto a separate deck of cards. Each table represented a different force on the moon. Next, he duplicated the cards and shuffled them together, using a card sorter in a downtown London office.
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When he was done, the first cards had the values for January 1, the next cards had the values for January 2, and so forth. In the final step of the calculation, he put the cards for each day through a tabulator in order to sum the values.
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The process was relatively quick and possessed the added benefit that “a small change may be made in the elements and the new values of the coordinates obtained with almost no additional work.”
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Comrie was not in a position to further develop the methods of punched card computation, as the British
Nautical Almanac
did not have its own tabulator. However, he sent a copy of his computing plan to Eckert, who had access to Wood's tabulating facility at Columbia. Eckert studied Comrie's plan and carefully duplicated the English computations.
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From this work, he slowly began to expand his skill with the tabulating equipment, learning how to handle complicated analyses and difficult computations. By the spring of 1934, he had become the expert in scientific computation with punched card equipment and had supplanted Benjamin Wood as the faculty contact with International Business Machines. That spring, IBM recognized Eckert's growing prominence by helping him create a new facility, the Columbia University Astronomical Computing Bureau. This organization was not really a separate laboratory, for it used the same machines that were being used to tabulate educational statistics. It did have one new piece of equipment, an IBM 601 multiplying punch, which eliminated the need to do progressive digiting.

For all of the attention that International Business Machines gave to Columbia University, Benjamin Wood, and Wallace Eckert, the company considered scientific computing to be only a minor application of their equipment. In 1935, the company prepared a book to promote the use of tabulators in higher education, entitled
Practical Applications of the Punched Card Methods in Colleges and Universities
. The volume was edited by a company employee and was published by Columbia University Press. “So numerous are the uses of the punched card method in colleges and universities,” read the preface, “and so great the interest shown by these institutions that the creation of this volume was a logical development.”
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Fully four-fifths of the contributions to the book were business applications: class records, patient histories, student accounts, course registration, resource scheduling. Of the remaining fifth, most dealt with
social statistics. Three entire chapters had been submitted by the statisticians at Iowa State College. Only Eckert's chapter, buried at the back of the book, dealt with astronomy.

Eckert began to record the methods of scientific computation in a notebook which was known locally as the “Orange Book.” In the pages of this book, he described how to reduce data, create a star catalog, compare observed positions with theoretical calculations, and mechanize the solution of differential equations.
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His descriptions showed how to prepare the cards and how to work with the sorters, tabulators, and punches. Through 1935 and 1936, scientists began to appear at the door of the laboratory. Some had written to ask for permission to visit; others, who may have been passing through New York or attending a conference down by one of the railroad stations, simply arrived unannounced. They talked with Eckert, handled the cards, watched the machines in operation, worked with one of the machine operators, and usually inquired if they might make a copy of some page of the Orange Book.
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In 1936, one of Eckert's visitors was an astronomer from the Soviet Union, the aptly named Boris Numerov. Numerov walked freely among the equipment, listened to Eckert talk about the benefits of punched card calculation, and, most likely, took copies of pages from the Orange Book. When Numerov left the lab, he apparently told Eckert that he would keep in touch or that he might write later or that perhaps he would need Eckert's assistance in building a punched card facility in the Soviet Union. Eckert accepted the farewell, watched Numerov depart for Moscow, but never heard from him again. It was the era of the Stalinist purges, and Eckert came to believe that the Soviet astronomer had been punished or killed for inquiring about punched card tabulation. It was a misguided concern, as Numerov almost certainly had the permission of the Communist Party for his visit, but it was not without basis in fact. The threat to the astronomer came not from a visit to an American computing laboratory but from a German name for an asteroid. Numerov was arrested after the Soviet secret police learned that German astronomers had named a small planet Numerov. Concluding that anyone who received such an honor from Germany was likely a spy, the secret police had him executed.
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Eckert may not have appreciated the politics that pulled Numerov to his doom, but he was able to recognize the forces pulling on his computing facility. By 1936, the Columbia Computing Bureau was the prominent facility for scientific computation with punched card equipment, a laboratory far more visible than the Iowa State Statistical Laboratory or the computing office at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As the leader of the astronomical computing bureau, Eckert was increasingly identified with International Business Machines, even though he remained a member
of the Columbia faculty. In his writings, however, he made it clear that he was not a blind advocate for IBM, an unquestioning promoter of tabulation equipment. “The main question in any case is not ‘can the problem be solved by these machines,'” he wrote, “but rather ‘have I enough operations of this type or that, to justify such powerful equipment.'”
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Still, his ties with IBM were close, and when he decided to publish his Orange Book of computational methods, he used the publication services of International Business Machines rather than Columbia University Press or some other university publisher.
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In 1933, when organized computing had taken root at Indiana University, at the Cowles Commission, and at Columbia University, the National Research Council returned to the idea of preparing a general bibliography of mathematical tables. Some on the council, including Thornton Fry, believed that Davis might be the appropriate person to head the unfinished Subcommittee on the Bibliography of Mathematical Tables and Other Aids for Computation. Others had reservations. Davis would not “be the right man to head up a committee along this line,” wrote Henry Rietz (1875–1943), a professor at the University of Iowa. He observed that Davis expressed more enthusiasm than discipline and that “Professor Davis very strongly believes that the real problem of aids to computation rests in table-making itself rather than in a comprehensive bibliography.”
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The rest of the council reluctantly concurred and continued its search. Finally, they returned to the Aberdeen veterans and selected A. A. Bennett of Brown University, a mathematician who had worked with both Oswald Veblen and Forest Ray Moulton. “Bennett seems especially well-fitted for the work,” argued Rietz, “not only because he would probably do a scholarly piece of work, but because Brown has … the best collection of mathematical tables in connection with any university.”
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Bennett accepted the chair of the MTAC committee in 1935, but the appointment came at a poor time for him. Along with Oswald Veblen and Gilbert Bliss, he was a consultant to the Aberdeen Proving Ground. In 1935, the proving ground had reorganized the division engaged in ballistics research and had increased the number of test firings on the artillery ranges for the first time in a decade.
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In the years since the First World War, ballistics research had been divided into three distinct fields. The traditional computation of trajectories was now identified as external ballistics, which was contrasted with internal ballistics, the study of the stresses and pressures within a gun. The final division dealt with the physics of exploding shells and was called, appropriately, terminal ballistics. The new Ballistics Research Office had sections devoted to each aspect of the research as well as a new central computing office.
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