Slashdot Mirror
Rediscovering WWII's Top-Secret Computing 'Rosies'
An anonymous reader writes "Women were recruited to do ballistics calculations and program computers during WWII. Half a century later, their work is only beginning to get recognition."
Some of that recognition is in the form of a documentary film released in 2010 titled Top Secret Rosies.
Of course people had to these calculations back then; calculating machines that could do it were yet to be developed. The people hired to do it were almost invariably women. _When Computers Were Human_ (http://www.amazon.com/When-Computers-Human-David-Grier/dp/0691133824/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297235612&sr=8-1) is a good book on the subject, although it doesn't limit itself to WWII.
I'm shocked and amazed, if even an amateur historian hasn't heard about this, it must be an amazing discovery
I went to high school in the late 1970's, just when the electronic calculator was becoming commercially viable. The head of our high school math department was a woman who also taught the linear algebra class. At that point she was in her 50s, and she liked to tell students her story of being a "calculator" during WW II, when she was fresh out of college. That's back when "arrays" were actual arrays of desks, one "calculator" in each performing one calculation on paper, passing the result to other calculator desks near her, getting results from others, then continuing the calculation with the newly received numbers for the next iteration.
To this day when I'm programming a parallel physical model, I think of her saying "I was a calculator" and smiling at our bewildered faces. I'm glad to hear she's being remembered this way.
That wasn't the first time women were employed doing calculations. A better known groups is known as "Harvard Computers", where astronomist Edward Pickering hired women to process data. One reason is said to be that women could be paid less than men.
Two well-known women from that group were Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt.
Wikipedia has a short article about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers
Randomly saw this article from 2009 a few minutes before seeing this Slashdot story. Seems she had quite the career:
"Gloria Gordon Bolotsky was a gifted mathematician who, after working for the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York, moved to the University of Pennsylvania for a position at its engineering school. She was chosen for a secret project that would use her skills and moved with the group in 1947 to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland."
-- Joren
When Feynman was setting up discretized integrations using IBM machines for the Manhattan project, he made a human calculator model for what the IBM kit would do. The girls calculated as fast as the IBM punched-card based system of tabulators, collators, multipliers, adders, etc. In his words:
The only difference was that the IBM machines didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.
Never mind that he loved being around girls ;)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I think there were a lot of women who worked hard for the war effort who didn't get and who often didn't seek recognition for what they were doing. They were just doing their part to help win the war. My granny worked for the MI6 in London during WW2 as a code cipherer. She worked 18 hr days with a rest day inbetween. None of the men in her job category did such a thing. I think she determined that this made her highly productive and her superiors went for it. She participated in some really amazing stuff and didn't talk about it until the later years of her life.
Nowadays you have a generation of women who call themselves feminists... but are they really? They may be women who work but do they work hard in order to really advance the cause or do they do it so they can have recognition? A degree in Women's Studies doesn't make the world a better place. So many supposed feminists point to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a good role model. Hillary though stood by while her husband cheated on her then wrote a book about it. Would a real feminist do something like that?
My mother and father were teenagers in Canada during the war. My father grew up on a farm and ranch. Before the war they always could find "hired hands" during periods where there was a lot to do. After the war started, all able bodied men were off fighting the war, and there were no "hired hands" to be found. My mother was a "city girl," But every day, after school, a bunch of school kids were trucked out to farms to help with the field work. She said that the absence of men opened up a lot of opportunities for women to enter into jobs, that used to be a "men only" club. So this story doesn't surprise me. However, when the war ended, and the men returned, the women were kicked out. Though, my mom was happy that she didn't have to work in the fields anymore.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Please, please use quotes, since the comment you're replying to is modded to invisibility your post just looks schizophrenic.
Anyway, when it comes to the pay...as with most things in life the phrase "it's a little more complicated that that" applies.
women do tend to get paid slightly less.
Women genuinely are less likely to *ask* for more.
I'll dig out the link later but I came across a fascinating study done by an economics professor who looked into the subject in detail.
What prompted her interest was coming across a situation which at first looked like terrible discrimination but turned out to be a little more complicated.
She noticed that of the grad students in the department almost every male was teaching classes and no females were. In academia that's kind of a big deal since it means experience etc etc.
At first glance a simple case of discrimination..... so she went to ask the head of department why he was discriminating against all her female grad students.
And found out the simple reason.
Anyone who'd come to him and asked to teach a class had been given a class to teach.No females had actually asked. The males had.
It wasn't the head of departments fault the women hadn't asked.
So she organised some experiments to look into the phenomenon further.
participants were given a task and at the end were given a small sum of money and asked if they were happy with it.
If they said no got slightly more.
most of the males bargained for more, most of the females did not.
ie: women get less because they ask for less.
but of course still "it's a little more complicated that that" applies.
after even more experiments which included groups who could penalise each other and the opinions of other people was taken into account something else came up.
everyone ( especially women) was more likely to penalise a women who asked for more more than a man who asked for more and their opinions would be more negatively affected by women than men.
so it isn't utterly irrational. Women don't ask for more because they genuinely do get penalised more socially and they themselves penalise people more for the same actions so even when there is no penalty they're less likely to ask for the jobs they want or the extra pay they want.
While you 'Mercans were using women to do ballistics calculations over this side of the pond we had our purpose built babbage difference engines doing the job automatically. What do you mean, the first babbage engine was only completed in 2002? That's even later than the US arrives for wars!!! :-)
Jean Jennings Bartik was one of the women computers. In 1945, she was a recent graduate of Northwest Missouri State Teachers College, the school's one math major. She lived on her parents' farm, refusing the teaching jobs her father suggested, avoiding talk of marrying a farmer and having babies. Bartik was waiting on a job with the military. When a telegram arrived asking her to come right away, she took a late-night train and began new career in Philadelphia.
Besides, the US entered the WWII in 1942 if I'm not mistaken.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Yes, you are quite right. Singling out only the men (and often only the white men) does us all a great disservice.
As a matter of fact, this is exactly what Richard Feynman worked on during his time in Los Alamos during the development of the atomic bomb.
Feynman was in charge of a team of human computers, calculating expect bomb yields from theoretical equations or the like. They were using simple mechanical calculators to aid the process, but were otherwise simply "assembly line workers" as you put it. However, it turned out that simply regarding them in that way was not the best way to go about things. Feynman though they should be told what they were working on....
My guess is that a study of the history of human computers is likely to shed light on where many of our more esoteric computational algorithms originated from. There's probably an unwritten history of mathematical discovery that took place in these basements and number assembly lines.
May the Maths Be with you!
Yes, it does. But wouldn't the proper response be to ensure a history lesson is inclusive of the society, rather than further divide the topic? Otherwise it implies that History is "mens history" and shall remain that way.
Personally, I find that many of the people in such fields are at least a generation behind. Was there a need in the 1960s to explicitly break with convention to look at underrepresented groups? Probably. I don't know. I wasn't born yet. By the time I was in grade school we were certainly being taught about the colonization and exploitation of the American continents by European powers (and, later the US). Slavery. Voting rights. The Civil Rights movement. Etc.
And then some aging hippie professor would come along and act like we didn't know there were people here when Columbus landed. Just because you were taught that shit during the Eisenhower administration doesn't mean that's how I learned it.
Besides, the US entered the WWII in 1942 if I'm not mistaken.
Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec 7, 1941 and war was declared on Japan the next day. War was declared on Germany and italy a few days later after they declared.
However the US build up to war had been going on for years. This includes modernizing the army and navy, instituting the draft, ramping up military production, etc. "New" war jobs computing ballistic tables and such could have been created years before actual fighting and declarations of war.
Even when the first computer became available (Colossus) it was mostly operated by women.
Its been decades since I read a book on it, but I recall something about Bletchley hiring a special type of woman. Besides the obvious technical skills they also selected women with an immediate family members in front line combat units. With a son/father/husband/brother in harms way the military expected women to take security very seriously.
So am I, when she was an ambassador for Digital/Dec , she would hand out sachets of ground black pepper, the diameter of each piece was approximately the distance a signal travelled in one nanosecond.
Oh - really. The people hired to do the calcs were almost invariably women. So - how do you explain all the naval gunnery? No women aboard ships back then.
The sailors did not do calculations by hand. They had mechanical calculating devices that calculated a targeting solution. The sailors set relative bearing, distance, speed, etc of targets and the machines did the calculations. If sailors were doing hand calculations, there were expected to fight even if the fancy calculating machine was inoperable, they were using shortcuts such as data tables. They were not doing the full calculations from the most primitive inputs. These data tables were what the women on dry land were calculating.
Umm, you know that there were very few (less than 10?) ship to ship battles in WWII right? And even fewer had battleships exchanging gunfire.
Naval gunnery occurred far more often than you suggest, its not specific to battleships. Cruisers and destroyers engaged in many "gun fights". Perhaps one of the more famous areas for such combat was around Guadalcanal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Bottom_Sound
Very Cool. Seems incomprehensible that women would still receive decades of discrimination in the workplace after such feats; if the military trusted their intellect for such delicate matters, why couldn't everyone else?
It was not necessarily a matter of trust. Keep in mind that the great depression and massive unemployment did not really end until the ramp up of military spending for WW2. One of the great fears of the time was that when the war ended the US might return to economic depression and high unemployment. They wanted the returning veterans to have more job opportunities so wartime workers were let go, and it was not just the women. Many men who had not served in uniform were considered less desirable.
Some considered making sure returning vets got a job to be part of the "thank you" to those who made the greater sacrifices. Others may have been more practical and thought it better that those who were trained and well practiced in the use of weapons should be employed first. Don't laugh, this was the era of red scares and "communist revolt". The US did not help to rebuild Europe and Japan purely out of generosity and compassion, there was a very strong political stability motivation.
You're showing your ignorance here. A quick reading of Abramowitz and Stegun (that's *IRENE* Stegun) would enlighten you that, because the calculations were carried out by hand, a large number of algebraic approximations to special functions using asymptotic analysis for various parameter ranges were actually developed by the women doing the work. You'll notice their names in the bylines of each chapter. The use of special functions and asymptotic analysis of course goes beyond just optimizing hand calculations -- a lot of the optimizations used to implement special and algebraic functions in science and engineering libraries (e.g. NAG, IMSL) go back to Abramowitz and Stegun and beyond. Furthermore the use of special functions in the spectral solutions to ordinary and partial differential equations are made a lot easier by the work these women did. For example, Donna Elbert, as a graduate student of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (who later went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics), determined the zeroes of the modified Bessel functions in support of his ground-breaking work in the hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability of fluids in self-gravitating spherical shells (e.g the sun, the earth's outer core) using asymptotic analysis, which is, last time I took a course in it, usually reserved for upper-level engineering mathematics and first-year graduate students in mathematical physics. I'd hardly call it "assembly line work."