David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human, February 10, 2008
Sunday, February 10, 2008, 2:00 p.m., Community RoomNeedham Free Public Library, 1139 Highland Avenue, Needham, MA
Free and open to the public
Refreshments
Sponsored by the Friends of the Library
Before the arrival of electronic computers, the term “computer” usually referred to a person, someone who did mathematical calculations. Well into the twentieth century, such work was done mostly by hand.
The focus of David Alan Grier’s lecture, and book by the same title, is on the people who took us from hand calculation, through mechanical calculators, to electronic computers. Even if you don’t know a binary symbol from a decimal digit, the stories are fascinating.
For example, the beautiful Nicole-Reine Lepaute was captivated by the mathematics of change, now known as calculus. She and two men computed day after day by hand at the Palais Luxembourg, determined to predict the date of the return of Halley’s comet in 1758. (They came within 33 days.) At the Greenwich Observatory in the late 1830s, a group of teenaged boy computers worked regular 12-hour days on reducing astronomical data to tables important in navigation.
In the United States, the role of human computers began in the 1840s, and grew after the Civil War with the entry of more women into the work force as clerks. The Coast Survey in 1843 advertised for “gentlemen...to repeat the important calculations of the survey,” but by 1880, the Harvard Observatory prided itself on employing “a complete staff of female office workers,” including many Radcliffe graduates. They were parodied by a young astronomer in the popular style of Gilbert and Sullivan.
During the Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA, later renamed the Work Projects Administration) set up the Mathematical Tables Project, training unemployed men and women to do computation for scientific purposes. The Project’s resourceful technical leader devised a division of labor whereby computers with no knowledge of algebra handled negative numbers.
During World War II, physicist Richard Feynman challenged the IBM punched-card machine at Los Alamos to complete a calculation faster than a team of human computers. (The latter kept pace for the first two days, then fell behind on the third.) Increased scientific research after the war led to “automatic computing machines,” which used the binary arithmetic introduced by a Harvard professor before the Civil War. This would mean the demise of human computers before the end of the twentieth century.
David Alan Grier is associate professor in the Center for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University. From 2004-2007, he was Editor in Chief of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, the leading journal of the history of computers, computing practice, and the computer industy.
When Computers Were Human won the 2006 Independent Publisher Book Award in its category. The 2007 paperback edition (Princeton University Press) will be available for purchase and autograph.
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