When Computers Were Human (50 page)

For the mine-clearing problem, Neyman used a statistical model for “train bombing,” the practice of dropping bombs from a plane at regular intervals. He treated the train of bombs as a problem of geometric probability. The bombs became circles, which fell to their target like a handful of coins dropped on a tile floor. Some of the circles fell to the left, some to the right; some grew large, others shrank to a dot. Neyman's analysis estimated the number of handfuls that would be required in order to cover the floor.
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The analysis required a substantial amount of computation to move from coins on the floor to bombing tables, more than Neyman could handle by himself. He had a small computing staff in California, six students and an assistant, who shared five computing machines.
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These students could handle small projects, but like Neyman, they were more interested in the mathematics than in the calculation and tended to defer their numerical work until the late evening hours.
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Weaver had first tried to find a punched card facility to do the mine-clearing calculations. He talked with three different groups, the University of California business office, the laboratory of chemist Linus Pauling (1901–1994) at the California Institute of Technology, and the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau in New York. The University of California was unable to take the work, but the other two offices welcomed the task.
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“We would be very glad to team up with Neyman on any project that seems worthwhile to you,” Pauling told Weaver, adding, “The men here … have had now a great deal of experience with the use of punched card machines for mathematical calculations.”
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The Watson Laboratory reported that they were doing some work for Wallace Eckert at the
Nautical Almanac
, “but they seem to think that this could be put to one side.” Weaver urged Neyman to send his analysis to the Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau, as the “costs are exceedingly moderate due to the fact that the IBM company furnishes all equipment, etc. so that we would need to pay only stipends of the people involved and consumed supplies.”
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In the end, neither Pauling's lab nor the Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau handled the computation. Warren Weaver assigned the job to the Mathematical Tables Project, and Gertrude Blanch prepared the computing plan.
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At first, Blanch believed the work could be accomplished by a handful of her workers. Following the progress from California, Neyman soon realized that Blanch's plan did not capture his intent. “Soon after the computations were started, it appeared necessary to alter the program,” he reported to Weaver, “which means in fact to extend
it.” The new plan required more effort from the Mathematical Tables Project computers. Before long, the entire staff was spending two full shifts working on nothing but Neyman's calculations. “I am sorry for underestimating the amount of computations done by Dr. Lowan,” Neyman apologized. In all, the calculations had consumed twenty-three times the labor that he had anticipated.
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The final report was completed, after three full weeks of labor, on December 17, 1943.
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As with many of the war computations produced by the Mathematical Tables Project, Blanch and Lowan sent their results to the Applied Mathematics Panel and had only the vaguest idea how they would be used. It was like sending offspring into the world and never knowing what these children would accomplish, what trials they would face, where they would make their home. At times, Lowan would comfort himself, thinking that this work was a humble but key part of the war effort. It was like the proverbial nail which, if lost, would cause the loss of a horseshoe and set in motion a chain of disasters that would precipitate the loss of a horse, a rider, and ultimately the battle itself. Lowan desperately wanted to connect the Mathematical Tables Project to the successes of the war, and so he avoided the moments of sober contemplation, which would have reminded a more secure leader that a horseshoe is generally affixed to the hoof not with a single nail but with six. Neyman's tables represented but one way of preparing the landing site at Normandy. After surveying the beaches more closely, the planners of Operation Overlord concluded that there were no mines blocking the invasion. The bombers that would have been assigned to mine clearing were deployed against artillery batteries.
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The computations were filed away and never used.

Just before the turn of the new year, the Applied Mathematics Panel was approached by a commander from the navy's Bureau of Ordnance. The officer reported that the bureau wished to purchase a computing machine to handle exterior ballistics calculations, but they had “absolutely no one who can survey the machines available.” Their scientists were “inclined to favor one that uses digital computation,” but they knew little about such devices. The commander asked the panel members to prepare a report on computing machines and make a recommendation to the navy. The commander's superiors indicated that the Bureau of Ordnance would need “the backing of an Applied Mathematics Panel recommendation in order to secure a satisfactory machine.”
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This request was awkward for Weaver. As much as he wanted to prepare a survey of computing machines, he believed that none of the Applied Mathematics Panel scientists could produce such a report without bias. George Stibitz was the panel member best prepared to write such a report, but he was predisposed to electric machines built from relays, such
as his complex calculator. That winter, he was designing a second machine with the technology. This device was an interpolator, a machine that could compute intermediate values of a function.
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After weighing the virtues of expertise against the problems of conflicted interests, Warren Weaver asked Stibitz to prepare the review. In an attempt to ensure that the report was balanced, he asked the Bell Telephone Laboratories researcher to work with a committee that included a naval officer and an MIT professor, whom he characterized as being “familiar with the electronic type of computer and with the IBM equipment.”
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Stibitz's committee restricted their attention to large machines, such as the calculator that Howard Aiken had begun in 1938. This machine, which had been under construction for much of the war, was nearing completion at an IBM factory. IBM engineers had tested large parts of the device and were preparing to ship it to Harvard. The committee also considered the differential analyzers that were operating at MIT, Aberdeen, and the University of Pennsylvania. The Stibitz committee ignored the ENIAC, the digital differential analyzer under construction at Pennsylvania.
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The project was far from finished, and hence there was not much to report. It was still classified by the army, but those outsiders who knew about it had doubts about its future. Its lead designers, J. Presper Eckert (1919–1995) and John Mauchly (1907–1980), did not have much of a pedigree. Mauchly was a former teacher at a small religious college outside of Philadelphia. He had been introduced to computational problems during the Depression, when he had organized a statistical laboratory with National Youth Administration funds.
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Eckert was a recent graduate of the university's electrical engineering program. He had been known as a clever student, but he had not been at the top of his class, nor had he ever built a large machine.
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The report did not have much influence over the navy's computing plans. As Stibitz was preparing the report, the Bureau of Ordnance was making arrangements to assume authority over Aiken's machine at Harvard and was considering a more advanced version of the device.
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Still, the navy was satisfied with the paper and circulated it to their officers.
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Stibitz followed this review with studies of punched card equipment, relay computers, and interpolating machines. Gertrude Blanch contributed a small part to one report on computing machinery. She was asked by Stibitz to “determine which iterative [computational] methods lend themselves best to the instrumentation of a modern computing device.”
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Given the limitations of standard punched card equipment, it was not entirely clear that any of the computing machinery would be as flexible as a staff of human computers. Blanch studied the details of the Bell Telephone Laboratories computing machines, including the new interpolator and the design for a more sophisticated calculator that was still under construction. After she grasped that these machines could perform
lists of instructions, she reported that most of her “techniques should work well on relay computers.”
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In its first year as a contractor to the Applied Mathematics Panel, the Mathematical Tables Project had drawn few signs of respect from the panel's senior mathematicians. They seemed to view the group as a secondary research unit, an organization much inferior to Columbia and Princeton. None of the panel members had even visited the offices of their second-largest contractor, preferring instead to send Warren Weaver's administrative assistant, Mina Rees (1902–1997), to communicate with Arnold Lowan. In correspondence they tended to call the project director “Mr. Lowan” rather than “Doctor Lowan,” the honorific they reserved for scientists that they did not know, or the unadorned “Lowan,” the form they reserved for themselves.
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Their attitude toward the group began to change when Cornelius Lanczos (1893–1974) joined the planning committee. Lanczos was a well-respected applied mathematician and had served for a year as a research assistant to Albert Einstein. He was one of the many Jewish mathematicians who had fled Eastern Europe in the 1930s and settled in the United States. For a time, he had held a position at Purdue University, but he was a poor match for the school. “I am trying desperately to get away from here,” he had written to Einstein.
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He was so desperate that he was willing to forgo a regular university appointment and take a position at a former relief project.

Lanczos never served as a traditional planner, never prepared a computing plan, never oversaw the computing staff. Instead, he acted like a visiting scholar, an expert on the methods of calculation who could teach new techniques to Gertrude Blanch, Ida Rhodes, and the other members of the planning committee. Starting in the winter of 1944, he offered seminars on numerical methods, advertising them through the Applied Mathematics Panel and nearby New York University. “His lectures attracted a wide audience, not only from the Project, but from mathematicians at local universities,” recalled Ida Rhodes.
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These lectures brought a small glimmer of respect from the Applied Mathematics Panel. By March, they were starting to address Lowan in more informal terms and to refer to the project as “Lowan's Group.”
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More important, they were pointing to the Mathematical Tables Project as a successful computing organization. They encouraged prospective computers to visit the organization and copy its operating procedures. Among the visitors that winter was a group of scientists that was preparing to build a computing laboratory for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Computing laboratories were familiar institutions to the atomic scientists, as most of the major university physics departments had some kind of computing staff. Yet these academic laboratories were far smaller than the scale demanded by the effort to build the bomb. The computing office
at the University of Chicago, one of the larger contractors to the Manhattan Project, consisted of just one faculty wife and a few graduate students.
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The senior leaders of Los Alamos wanted to model their organization on the largest computing offices of the Applied Mathematics Panel, the Thomas J. Watson Bureau and the Mathematical Tables Project.

The Watson Laboratory received the first visitors from the Los Alamos staff, a couple named Mary and Stanley Frankel. Stanley Frankel had managed the computing bureau at the University of California that had handled the calculations for isotope separation, the problem of extracting the type of uranium that could be used in a chain reaction.
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It was a small group with none of the equipment that could be found at Columbia. The Frankels spent about three days at the bureau, working with director Jan Schilt and a young graduate student named Everett Yowell (1920–).
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Yowell had the rare distinction of being a second-generation computer. His father, also named Everett Yowell (1870–1959), had computed for the Naval Observatory from 1901 to 1906. The elder Yowell was part of the generation that had known Simon Newcomb, Myrrick Doolittle, and the computers of 1918 Aberdeen.
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After his service as a computer, the senior Yowell had become a mathematics instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy and then had returned to the family home in Ohio to become the head of the Cincinnati Observatory. The younger Everett Yowell spent his youth playing in the halls and chambers of the observatory. His father taught him how to use a telescope, how to record the position of an object, how to reduce astronomical data. His texts were the classic books: Crelle's
Tables
, Newcomb's
Positional Astronomy
. At the age of twelve, Yowell assisted his father on an expedition to study a solar eclipse. He entered college with a firm understanding of traditional astronomy and arrived at Columbia knowing the methods of hand computers.
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During his first year at the school, Yowell had little contact with the Watson Bureau. “I was sort of drafted as an operator during the summer of '42,” he recalled. The facility was beginning to do calculations for war research and had lost much of its skilled staff. Eckert was in Washington, and many of the younger workers had left for the military. Yowell learned the techniques of punched card computation by studying Eckert's Orange Book and by experimenting with the machines. Over the course of a year, he became an expert on wiring plugboards, the mechanisms that controlled the tabulators. Plugboards were flat panels, about the size of a large notebook, that were filled with holes that represented the different operations of the tabulator. By connecting the holes with short cables, Yowell could direct the flow of data through the machines and implement the methods of the Orange Book.
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