Book review
When Computers Were Human by David Alan Grier
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Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2005 I picked up Grier's book thinking it might be a rather dry account of a now irrelevant chapter in the history of computation, but within the first few pages I became fascinated by the stories of the individuals who were computers before (electronic) computers arrived. The book begins with the appearance of Halley's comet in 1682, and the work of Edmund Halley and others on "the finding a Cometts orb by calculation", satirised at the time by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels. From here on the return of the famous comet punctuates the book at regular intervals, as the calculation of the date of its perihelion becomes increasingly accurate, and is eventually (in 1986) programmed in FORTRAN IV at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Astronomical tables take pride of place in the first section of the book (up to 1880), which deals with the division of labour (following Adam Smith) and the use of teams of computers to perform the necessary calculations. Their labours were responsible for the British and the American Nautical Almanac, as well as for processing data from surveys and meteorological intelligence. Various themes make their appearance during this first section of the book. One is the interweaving tale of the development of mechanical (and later electrical and electronic) calculating machines, starting with Babbage's celebrated, but ultimately unsuccessful, Difference Engine (also satirised by Swift). Later chapters introduce the Brunsviga calculating machine, the Hollerith punched card tabulator, Atanasoff's machine, and the ENIAC computer. Like the machines, famous figures from the history of computing dance in and out of the story. Thomas J Watson appears in 1911 as president of the Computing, Tabulating and Recording Company, later to become Internation Business Machines. In 1943 Grace Hopper is invited to join the Applied Mathematics Panel, but takes up a commision with the navy. And in the same year John von Neumann makes a trip to England as a result of which "I received … a decisive impulse which determined my interest in computing machines". Another key theme which appears during the first section of the book is the role of women in computing. Before their talents were recognised, women were initially employed partly for reasons of economy; by 1880 the computing staff at Harvard Observatory was entirely female, and was paid half the prevailing rate for calculation. The director of the Naval Observatory at Washington complained that "[The Harvard] computers are largely women, who can be got to work for next to nothing". The second section of the book covers the period from 1880 to 1930, when computers became involved in the statistical calculations needed to support the development of mass production and new sciences. And the greatest computing effort of all during this period was driven by the First World War, for which accurate ballistics tables, covering high-altitude and long-range fire, were an essential requirement. The third and final section of the book deals with the development of professional computers and an independent discipline during the period from 1930 to 1964. The key theme running through this period is the production of general mathematical tables, and particularly the Mathematical Tables Project, one of the relief projects funded after the Great Depression by the Work Projects Administration. The Mathematical Tables Project brings into the story a woman who plays a leading role in this part of the book; Gertrude Blanch. She had been born Gittel Kaimowitz in Poland in 1896, and her family had fled to the United States to escape the czarist pogroms. There she gained a doctorate in mathematics, and was discovered by Arnold Lowan, director of the Mathematical Tables Project, where she soon took responsibility for day-to-day management of the project. Blanch's contribution to mathematics and computing is encapsulated in the Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs and Mathematical Tables published in 1964, in which she was heavily involved, and which became the most widely circulated scientific text ever published. It was the essential companion for scientists working on the small and mid-sized calculations that could no be handled by the IBM 360 and other machines announced in 1964. Ultimately however, the role of the many human computers was left largely unrecognised as the electronic computer took centre stage. And their shift of fortune is symbolised in the two photographs of Gertrude Blanch in this book; the first shows her as a young woman, looking proudly to the future, but in the second she is long retired, and stands glowering beside a new electronic computer. Grier's book aims to redress the balance in telling the neglected story of these human computers. It is a fascinating read, which sheds much light on social and other developments, and it is also a serious academic book, with some 70 pages of notes and bibliography, and a thorough index. It is a valuable contribution which deserves to be widely read. |
