Slashdot Mirror
When Computers Were Human
The most important of these teams was the Mathematical Tables Project, organized by the Work Projects Administration in the United States during the Great Depression. WPA rules required the hiring of people with virtually no skills, so much of the definitive work of the Mathematical Tables Project was computed by people who had mastered only addition. They were not authorized to subtract, let alone delve into the mysteries of multiplication or division. The algorithmic steps assigned to them sometimes produced negative numbers, and it goes almost without saying that these computers had no idea what these were or how to handle them. Gertrude Blanch, the mathematician who oversaw their work, had devised a scheme whereby positive numbers would be written in black, negative numbers in red. On the wall in front of her human computers hung a poster that encapsulates much of the era of human computing. It read:
Black plus black is blackRed plus red is red
Black plus red or red plus black, hand the sheets to team 2
Grier has written a history of human computing. It begins in the 1760s and continues through the two hundred years until digital computers ended the industry.
From the start, computers were dedicated to projects in astronomy, cartography, and navigation. Grier describes the nature of these problems and why they required numerical solutions. He touches on the alternating competition and cooperation between teams of computers in different countries, and the different organizational models they employed. Perhaps the most memorable fact from the early years of human computing is that the very first team of French computers, assembled by Gaspard Clair Francois Marie Riche de Prony in the early 1790s, was composed entirely of wig-makers left unemployed by the French Revolution. They created trigonometric tables required by France's experiments with the decimalization of trigonometry (an abandoned effort to do for angle measure what the metric system was doing for the measurement of mass, length, and so forth).
Their work, though of little ultimate relevance to the modern world, illustrates aspects of human computing that would not change. Major computing efforts were always sponsored by governments. A small number of planners oversaw work by people who themselves knew little math. And the bulk of the work was done by people who were marginalized, perhaps otherwise unemployable, and who would do the repetitive calculations. This work conferred no prestige, and many were skeptical even of the conclusions drawn from it. If an equation could not be properly solved, how could one take confidence from any numerical approximation? Even Henry David Thoreau worked a dig at human computers into the manuscript for Walden, dismissing the mathematics that might allow an astronomer "to discover new satellites of Neptune but not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself."
Women emerged as the most important computers. Demand for computing spiked in wartime, when young men were off fighting and therefore unavailable, and the economics of hiring women was compelling even in peacetime. They would work for half of what similarly skilled men would. By World War II, in the United States, computing power was measured not in megahertz or teraflops, but in kilogirls.
By the 20th century, the work of human computers was augmented by mechanical or even electrical calculators that automated certain steps of their work, but these were expensive and prone to breakdown, and did not significantly change the nature of the work.
Grier devotes special attention to the Mathematical Tables Project run by the WPA, later taken over by the National Bureau of Standards, and to the mathematician Gertrude Blanch who ran that team. She is fascinating, a woman who arrived in the United States at the age of 11, who had worked to support her family and not been able to get her Ph.D until she was 39 years old. It was then 1936, the middle of the Great Depression, and the job prospects for female, Jewish mathematicians were bleak. Through luck and hard work she found her way to the Mathematical Tables Project, where she assumed a role that combined mathematician, schoolteacher, and coach. Her fanatical attention to error-checking resulted in tables good enough to win the support of those who were skeptical of work by a government relief organization. She also led by example, and solved certain problems personally when she thought that would be easier than breaking down the algorithms for her computers. Grier says that Blanch in this way personally did work that backed Hans Bethe's Nobel prize-winning model of solar evolution, though it is unclear if Bethe ever knew that the math had been done by one mathematician, rather than her computers. After the war, Blanch was hampered by FBI suspicions that she was secretly a communist. Their evidence for this was nearly nonexistent, and in what must have been a remarkable showdown, this diminutive fifty-year-old mathematician demanded, and won, a hearing to clear her name. She worked productively in numerical mathematics and algorithms for the rest of her life, but remained forever suspicious of digital computers and never adopted them herself.
Grier does excellent research, tracking down surviving computers and sorting through family letters to tell the stories of an entire industry that is being forgotten. He even finds evidence for the working environment for the women computers at Harvard Observatory in the late 1870s in the lyrics to a satire of Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore, written by a junior astronomer there at the time.
The book is beautifully printed and has a comprehensive index. Kudos to the Princeton University Press for taking such pride in their work.
When Computers Were Human is weak in several areas. First, Grier glosses over technical aspects of human computing. What were the algorithms that these people used? How was error-checking implemented? He never tells us. Clearly, Grier's goal was to write a work of history, not math, but the people likely to read it are people who care about the math, or about computers, and he omits material that such readers would expect. Second, this is a bureaucratic story. The best human computing was done by large teams sponsored by government in wartime, and the story of these teams revolves around the politicians or bureaucrats who arranged for their funding, and the various acronym-labeled groups that gave them work or provided their employees. At times, it reads as much like a history of agricultural policies as a text about the prehistory of computers.
Grier's story follows his sources: he devotes space to the groups where he has the most material, even if others may have been larger or done more important work. Finally, his discussion of digital computers, where they play a role in the story, is cursory, and may not give credit to those who deserve it.
Is it worth reading? Yes. Consider the reviews of the final tables published by the Bureau of Standards at Amazon.com: In comments as recent as 2004, people who are still using these 50-year-old volumes comment in several languages on which chapters of the books are most useful, where to beware of errors or outdated methods, and on the special emotional role that these volumes play for those who use them, or who needed them in the past. "I probably would never have gotten my Ph.D without this book, and it is a stupendous classic." "Nearly every time you need a mathematical relation or information you will find it on this book." "If you work with mathematical research or numerical computing, you must have this book," and so forth. This praise, and Grier's book, are fine testaments to the world's first computers.
You can purchase When Computers Were Human from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
You can have my circular slide-rule when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Now what's the percentage of the businesses/governments that used open source software/algorithms on their human computers?
But can they boot up with Linux? And when the supervisory mathematicians added a new table for them to use, did you have to recompile them? :D
Did he write this book before or after his seminal work on "In Living Color": When Television Was Funny.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
The more interesting part is the title rather than the blurb though. It sounded almost like when men were men, women were women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were small furry creatures. Sadly this seems to be a story about the people who bothered the so called computers rather than a story of grit and glory - a story of buearacracy and communist witch hunts ?.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The Sandiego Supercomputer is made of people! You've got to tell them! Sandiego Supercomputer is people!
Starsucks
My mother was one of those computers - she worked in England during WWII, using a 'comptometer' and had no idea what she was computing, despite hearing random roaring noises from elsewhere in the facility, until one fine day she was introduced to a Mr. Whittle, who had designed one of the first jet engines for Great Britain.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
This sounds like a demeaning, brutal job. Almost like a factory for addition. Can you imagine what these folks talked about when they went home at night?
"Had a bunch of sevens at the plant today. Thought we never add them all up."
There's a slide-rule connection here. Oddly enough, numbers that couldn't be computed on a slide rule were deemed irrational. For those interested in slide rules, Here's a short history of the slide rule and here's a guy's collection of slide rules
Microsoft Taken To Task On Hiring Practices
http://www.gwu.edu/~elliott/facultystaff/grier.cfm
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
So instead of asking a hunk of plastic and metal for answers to math problems, I would have been asking a room full of educated unmarried women?
This is progress!?!?!
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Did they feed them pi?
Pi are round. They don't provide square meals.
Tables calculated by humans also contained a lot of human errors - I understand Charles Babbage was so frustrated by errors in human calculated tables that he wished for some way they could be calculated "by steam" (engine/machine).
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Feynman is credited with an early application of parallel processing in the way he divided up his "girls" to do the yield calculations for the first atomic bomb, while they were waiting for IBM machines to be set up at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Instead of each girl doing one whole equation herself, he divided the work so that one girl would only do a single kind of operation (such as cube roots.) In his memoir, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," he writes that with this scheme he was able to get the predicted speed of the IBM machines out of his human computers. "The difference was that the machine didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after awhile."
There is a great short story by Asimov, in which many years in the future, man has forgotten how to do math without an electronic computer. It then happens one day that a young man figures out a process for doing addition and multiplication on paper, and shows off his new methods to a bunch of government big wigs. The military planners are overjoyed, and they begin to redesign their rockets so they can fit a man, who will then be able to calculate his trajectory and pilot the missile to its target by using pencil and paper. This is a huge win for all involved, because humans are much cheaper than computers, of course. :)
People wihout much of a background in physics would trall through the images, looking for patterns that they'd been told to look out for.
I think its important that someone is documenting the work of these heroes of maths and physics. Without them, advancements would have had to wait for the computer revolution. If we don't remember how important their contributions were, I'm sure it will only be a generation before they're forgotten.
I think you have your figures wrong, however,
a pita_Percent_of_GDP_and_by_President_1976-2004.htm
this table shows every single Demo president since Carter _decreasing_ national debt as a percentage of GNP, and every Repo president _increasing_ it. So the common wisdom that Demo's overspend vis-a-vis Repo's is just wrong, and your point is basically correct even though the number is wrong.
http://www.skymachines.com/US_National_Debt_Per_C
Reminds me of an Asimov story "The Feeling of Power" written by Asimov in 1958. People of the future, who are totally reliant on personal computers, experience the wonder at being able to do arithmetic by hand.
Are we there yet?
If anyone's interested, there are several sites with instructions on creating your own slide rule.
h tml
http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/build.html
http://solar.physics.montana.edu/kankel/math/csr.
etc.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Is that when laptops were pretty secretaries?
Humans have such a good sense of humor!
People could add but not subtract? They could know what a positive number is, but not a negative?
There was a time when this was true of YOU, y'know.
Granted, these days most of us in industrialized nations move on and grok subtraction and negative numbers by second grade, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that 3/4ths of a century ago, some unskilled works might have made it to adulthood without getting that far.
The Smithsonian has a great interview with Ida Rhodes, who assisted Blanch.
Here.
The last few years of school I went to waldorf school. We actually learned to use log tables (still got my table book here) and calculators were forbidden.
We'd draw roots using them and all.
The reasoning was that anyone can keypunch but understanding what log actually mean is a differn't thing and requires getting your hands dirty. It was at that time when I started programming on my first computer - a PC 1402 Sharp Pocket Computer. Amongst my friends I was the only one that actually understood what these symbols really meant.
I'm gratefull for our teachers taking us that way. I'd actually do the same. Once you've really understood what logs are all about (and when you do your A levels with log tables you have understood what they're about) tackeling larger math problems is a piece of cake.
Take this advice: If you have kids, don't let them near/use an electronic calculator to early. Give them log tables or a slide ruler. It's the best was to learn higher math.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If you run more electricity through them, do they work faster?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!