When Computers Were Human (48 page)

Brainerd's plan had serious problems, as he freely admitted. The university lacked enough instructors qualified to teach mathematical ballistics. The only faculty willing to train the women were three retired professors,
whom many judged “no longer up to the strain of teaching day long courses.”
²⁰
Nothing improved the prospects for the training courses until Adele Goldstine (1920–1964) walked into Brainerd's office in September. Goldstine was the wife of the officer that the army had assigned to monitor the computing work at the university. She was a slight woman but poised and filled with energy. She had the education that Brainerd needed, a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Hunter College for Women in New York City, a master's degree from the University of Michigan, and a connection to mathematical ballistics. Her husband had studied with Gilbert Bliss and had helped Bliss prepare a textbook on mathematical ballistics.
²¹
Within a few weeks of her arrival, Adele Goldstine had taken command of the training program. According to her husband, she immediately “got rid of the deadwood,” the three retired professors, replaced them with two younger instructors, and helped teach the first group of students, twenty-one in number. These students completed the training that fall, swore the required oath of allegiance, and started work as computers.
²²

From the start, the University of Pennsylvania recruited only “women college graduates.” The sign “Women Only” marked the door of the computing office, which was a converted fraternity house.
²³
This decision was not based on any dictate from the Ballistics Research Laboratory, for the Aberdeen computing staff included both men and women.
²⁴
In all likelihood, it was motivated by common stereotypes concerning office work and gender: that men were difficult to recruit for office work in wartime, that single-gender office staffs were easier to manage then mixed-gender staffs, that women were somehow specially suited for calculating.

Between classes, Goldstine spent much of her time recruiting potential computers. By the winter of 1943, John Brainerd had concluded that the university needed a staff two or three times larger than his initial estimate. They might require seventy or even eighty computers to keep the differential analyzer fully occupied and have a sufficient number of workers in reserve. In the winter of 1943, the school had less than half that number.
²⁵
Brainerd returned to the University of Pennsylvania alumna lists, sent circulars to the American Mathematics Society and the American Association of University Women, and wrote to university faculty to ask the professors to volunteer their daughters or their daughters' friends.
²⁶
As a last resort, Goldstine took to the road, visiting Bryn Mawr and Swathmore Colleges in suburban Philadelphia, Goucher College in Baltimore, Douglass in New Jersey, and her own Hunter College.
²⁷
“I've arranged to be at Queens College Tues[day],” she wrote to Brainerd from a hotel in New York, but she confessed that she did not expect much, as “next week is exam week. Also I was not able to arrange for any very effective means of advertising the job.” Even when she was able to notify
students of the opportunities at the University of Pennsylvania, she found few interested applicants. At one college, she found “only 25 or so women seniors all of whom have good prospects in their own fields and so probably could not be enticed by our offer.”
²⁸

Goldstine returned from her travels just as R. C. Archibald was printing the second issue of
Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation
. Though much of the publication was devoted to traditional mathematical tables, a few articles at the back dealt with computing machinery. The first, by L. J. Comrie, explained how traditional business machines could be adapted to scientific computation. The second, by Bell Telephone Laboratories mathematician Claude Shannon, discussed the operations of the differential analyzer.
²⁹
With human computers hard to find and an old analyzer struggling to meet the precision requirements, the computing staff was looking to build an improved computing machine, an electronic version of the differential analyzer. This new machine, tentatively called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, would have no mechanical parts that could slip or jam or in some other way induce inaccuracy.
³⁰

Even though he had an embarrassing departure from the British Nautical Almanac Office, L. J. Comrie remained the single most important source of computing information for English scientists. His company, Scientific Computing Service Ltd., was one of four major organizations that were handling ballistics, ordnance, and navigation calculations for the British government. The second group was the British Nautical Almanac Office. Like their American counterparts, these computers no longer shared the burden of producing an almanac with the French and Germans and hence had an extra burden of calculation. The third and fourth groups were the computing laboratories at the University of Manchester and Cambridge University. These two schools owned and operated differential analyzers, just like the University of Pennsylvania.
³¹

In the winter of 1943, the British government formed a fifth computing office, one that could undertake general-purpose calculations for both the military and the war industries. The group, called the Admiralty Computing Service, was the creation of Donald Sadler (1908–1987), Comrie's replacement at the
Nautical Almanac
, and John Todd (1915–), a professor at King's College. Todd had been educated at Cambridge under the watchful eye of John Littlewood, the mathematician who had developed ballistics theories in the First World War.
³²
Todd had taken a modest interest in computing problems as a student, but he did not become fully involved with computational mathematics until 1938, when he met L. J. Comrie at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Comrie befriended the young mathematician, introduced
him to the association's Mathematical Tables Committee, and eventually taught him the operation of the Brunsviga calculator, repeating the lessons that he had learned from Karl Pearson.
³³

39. John Todd of the Admiralty Computing Service

Todd had been drafted at the start of the war and assigned to a naval office that was studying ways of protecting ships from German mines. “I found the work boring,” he recalled, “and it was not very effective.”
³⁴
Todd's wife, the mathematician Olga Taussky (1906–1995), analyzed the vibration in aircraft structures for a government ministry. Her work produced large systems of equations with unknown values. “A large group of young girls,” she related, “drafted into war work, did the calculations on hand-operated machines.”
³⁵
From observing his wife and reflecting on his own experiences, Todd concluded that the war effort would benefit from a general-purpose computing organization. “I realized that pure mathematicians, such as I,” he later wrote, “could be more useful in dealing with computational matters and relieve those with applied training and interests from what they considered as chores.”
³⁶
In private, he was a little more pointed. “After a year of working for the navy, I decided that mathematicians could make tables better than physicists.”
³⁷
He joined forces with the almanac director, Donald Sadler, and created the Admiralty Computing Service.

Unlike most other computing offices, the Admiralty Computing Service
had two divisions, a staff of ten computers and a small group of mathematical analysts. The computers were managed by Sadler and were located in Bath, the eighteenth-century resort town where the almanac had been evacuated for the duration of the war. They occupied a prefabricated military building situated on an old Georgian estate. The computing staff consisted of students and young teachers, most of them male, who were unable or unwilling to serve in the military. Sadler described them as “nurtured by comprehensive special training,” as the skill of computation “cannot adequately be ‘picked up' in the course of day-to-day work.”
³⁸
They worked three to a room in their military hut, sharing tired desks and improvised tables. Their equipment, worn but serviceable, came from the Greenwich office of the almanac and included L. J. Comrie's old National Accounting Machine. Work began at eight in the morning, ended at five in the evening, and continued for a half day on Saturday. The weekly schedule included time for instruction, discussion, and a meeting for the review of results. “Sadler was a real martinet for getting rid of errors,” one computer recalled. “If you made a mistake on some work and if it went out, he'd give you such a dressing down that the whole office would know.”
³⁹

The second division of the Admiralty Computing Service, the mathematical analysts, worked in London and were overseen by Todd. London was a dangerous place, but it was also the home of the major scientific and engineering offices. “[John and I] moved 18 times during the war,” Olga Taussky later explained to a friend, the First World War computer Frances Cave-Browne-Cave, “and our belongings were hit by a flying bomb.”
⁴⁰
Moving past the damaged buildings and the rubble in the street, Todd traveled from office to office, talking with engineers, listening to government officials, reviewing military plans. “Often we could not help them with the problems they first presented to us,” he recalled, “but I usually found a different problem that we could do.”
⁴¹
For all that his clients knew, the computations were done somewhere beyond Paddington train station, where Todd began his journeys to Bath. Once or twice a week he would pass through the station, carrying requests for calculations and returning with finished results.

In the spring of 1943, Todd made the trip to Bath with John von Neumann, who had come to England in order to inspect British scientific efforts. Von Neumann then was working for the Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen and other American research projects. He had requested an opportunity to see the computing facility and L. J. Comrie's famous accounting machine. Todd and von Neumann spent a day in Bath, talking with the computers and observing the operation of the office. On the trip back to London, the two of them discussed a new way of doing interpolation with the accounting machine. The train windows
were blackened to avoid drawing the attention of German aircraft, so the two mathematicians had no distractions in the passing scenery. Taking out a piece of the “rather poor quality paper issued to government scientists at that time,” they began to prepare a computing plan. They worked as the train passed the royal castle at Windsor, the munitions plants at Slough, and the shuttered shops of Ealing. By the time the dark coaches reached the London station, they had completed their work. “It was a fixed program,” Todd wrote, but it did not quite eliminate the need for computers, as “it involved a lot of human intervention.”
⁴²
The experience intrigued von Neumann in a way that five years of circulars from the Mathematical Tables Project had not. Von Neumann had kept his distance from the WPA computing floor in Lower Manhattan even though he had promised to respond to Lowan's letters. With one trip to Bath, his views changed. “It is not necessary for me to tell you what [our visits] meant to me,” he wrote to Todd after the war, “and that, in particular, I received at that period, a decisive impulse which determined my interest in computing machines.”
⁴³

The two parts of the Admiralty Computing Service had obvious counterparts in the contractors of the Applied Mathematics Panel, but the American effort was far more complicated than John Todd's organization. In England, Todd was free to make most of the key decisions, but in the United States, all requests for mathematical and computational assistance were reviewed by a committee of mathematicians. This executive committee met weekly in the conference room of the Rockefeller Foundation, a sumptuous private suite on the 64th floor of Rockefeller Center's RCA Building.
⁴⁴
Meetings would begin with a luncheon, which gave the members an opportunity to chat about the issues of the day and discuss new developments in mathematics. At an early meeting, while Rockefeller Center waiters poured drinks and brought the plates of food, one member complained of “American indifference to the German 60 ton rocket,” which he described as a false faith that the Atlantic Ocean would protect the country.
⁴⁵
The mathematicians generally agreed that the German missile program was worrisome, yet they had also concluded that “the bombing of New York would be futile since an explosion outside of a building would break windows but not damage the structure itself, except very old brick types of structure.”
⁴⁶