When Computers Were Human

by David Alan Grier

  The press conference was a time of great pride and accomplishment, but it was also marked with a bit of impatience. As the ENIAC became operational, the University of Pennsylvania researchers had come to appreciate the limitations of their machine. “We designed [the ENIAC],” recounted Adele Goldstine’s husband, Herman, “and immediately lost interest in it.”52 In building this machine, they had recognized that they could design a more flexible machine that was controlled by a special list of electronic instructions rather than by the bulky cables. These lists would inherit the name “program.” The design team had conceived a way to modify the ENIAC so that they could control it with a primitive program, but they were more interested in building a new machine that would be entirely programmable.53

  The new, programmable machines were at least two years away, and in the interim, the University of Pennsylvania had to live with the ENIAC. The press conference generated a tremendous interest in computing devices. In response to requests to study and use their machine, the school organized a seven-week course on computing machinery, a conference that would be called the Moore School Lectures. When the course convened in July 1946, the list of lecturers constituted “a Who’s Who of computing of the day.” Most of the speakers came from the ENIAC project, though George Stibitz, Howard Aiken, and John von Neumann also conducted sessions. The talks had little in common with the discussions at Archibald’s conference three months before. The Moore lectures dealt with circuit design and the preparation of problems for machine computation. The students were not human computers but “a select group of seasoned professional engineers and mathematicians.”54 The discussions made little reference to human computing groups, and few in attendance had any experience with organized calculation. No one from the Mathematical Tables Project was invited to attend. L. J. Comrie was not chosen as a representative of Great Britain. There were no computers from any Nautical Almanac Office, the Manhattan Project, or any of the projects of the Applied Mathematics Panel.55

  Had any human computers been at the Moore School Lectures, they would have heard a somewhat fanciful history of calculating devices that ignored the contributions of workers like themselves. This history, the first of the lectures, also overlooked the punched card machines of Herman Hollerith and described the difference engine of Charles Babbage as “a special purpose [device] developed for the satisfaction of personal curiosity or as an intellectual stunt.”56 Historians of the conference claim that the talk was meant to “entertain and inspire,”57 but a close examination of the text suggests that it was an attempt to build a distinguished lineage for the electronic computing machine, a pedigree that ignored the influence of commerce and the hard labor of human computers. To many at the talk, the human computer was already starting to fade from memory. Most of the wartime computing groups had been shut down, reduced to a small remnant, or replaced by punched card equipment. The major employer of human computers, the Applied Mathematics Panel, had finally ceased operations after one last meeting. Led by Warren Weaver, the mathematicians had gathered in their old conference room to celebrate their accomplishments. There would be those who would criticize the panel and argue that it missed an opportunity to advance the cause of mathematics, but this was not the time for such discussions.58 The members of the panel spoke their praise to mathematics, to science, and to their accomplishments, though no one felt it necessary to express gratitude toward the workers who had undertaken the calculations.59

  Even though Arnold Lowan and Gertrude Blanch were not invited to the Moore School Lectures in the summer of 1946 or to the final meeting of the Applied Mathematics Panel, they were confident about the future. The navy and the Army Air Corps had guaranteed funds to sustain the operations of the Mathematical Tables Project for two more years, and the military services seemed likely to continue providing that money for a subsequent period, at least until they were in possession of a comprehensive facility with electronic computers. Even then, they seemed likely to retain the members of the Mathematical Tables Project as the support staff for the new computing machines.60 For the moment, the military provided the project with new and interesting computations, work beyond the traditional labor of preparing mathematical function and LORAN tables. The services asked for guided missile trajectories, radar wave deflections, and shock wave propagations. In addition to this work, the Mathematical Tables Project was now receiving requests for calculations relating to the development of atomic energy, such as problems that described the interactions of particles or analyzed reactor designs.61

  The only worrisome development for the project was a change of leadership at the National Bureau of Standards. The bureau had been the fixed point of the Mathematical Tables Project through the fluctuations of the Depression and the war. Lyman Briggs, director of the bureau, had been the champion of the project, sponsoring it for the WPA, serving as the executive manager under the Applied Mathematics Panel, and helping to obtain the postwar funding from the military.62 The planning committee of the project viewed him as the “Beloved Boss” who had supported Arnold Lowan, corrected his mistakes, both gently and not so gently, and spoken for him in the high councils of science.63 Briggs had retired in the fall of 1945 and had been succeeded by the physicist Edward Condon (1902–1974). When he first arrived at the Bureau of Standards, Condon had questioned the value of the group. He had changed his mind after a visit to the project’s offices, when he met Lowan, talked with the planning committee, and observed the computing staff. Condon concluded that the Mathematical Tables Project might be able to contribute to the National Bureau of Standards, though he also observed that there was no reason for Lowan to report directly to the bureau director. After returning to New York, he informed Lowan that the project would be guided by his new assistant, John Curtiss.64

  Curtiss was familiar with the work of the project and sympathetic to the group. Back in 1940, he had reviewed the first volumes from the Mathematical Tables Project in the American Mathematical Monthly and found them quite acceptable. By training, he was a statistician, but he came from a mathematical family and was well connected in the mathematical community. His father had been a professor at Northwestern University and had served as president of the Mathematical Association of America, the professional society devoted to mathematical instruction. Curtiss had studied at the University of Iowa and at Harvard. His rise to prominence had come during the war, when he had taken a naval commission and served as a statistician for the Bureau of Ships. Most of his work concerned quality control, the statistical methods that tested batches of manufactured products to ensure that all of them operated properly or met basic standards. At the end of the war, he was recommended to Condon as a mathematician who understood the nature of organizational politics.65

  Perhaps remembering Curtiss’s review, one of the few favorable signs in the early days of the Mathematical Tables Project, Arnold Lowan welcomed the arrival of John Curtiss and invited the statistician to visit New York. Curtiss accepted the offer and, like Condon before him, came away from the project offices with a favorable impression. He decided that the group should be a key part of a new mathematical research organization that he hoped to create within the National Bureau of Standards. For the moment, he was using the name “National Applied Mathematics Laboratories” to describe his idea. In his plan, the laboratories would have four distinct units. The first would research the methods of applied mathematics, the second would consider problems of applied statistics, and the third would develop new computing machines. The Mathematical Tables Project would be the fourth and final laboratory within the group. Renamed the Computation Laboratory, it would provide “a general computing service of high quality and large capacity, for use by private industry, Government agencies, educational institutions, etc.”66

  In Curtiss’s plan, the Computation Laboratory would be larger and better equipped than the old Mathematical Tables Project. It would have desk calculators, difference engines, punched card tabulators, “special analogue equip
ment for the solution of algebraic equations,” and finally “two general purpose automatic electronic digital computing machines of large capacity.”67 Arnold Lowan was delighted with this idea and immediately started referring to the Mathematical Tables Project as the Computation Laboratory, even though the new title would not become official for another eighteen months and the old name would stick to the group as if there was no other way to describe the former WPA project. There were many details to complete before Curtiss’s plan could be implemented. Curtiss and his boss, Edward Condon, had to obtain funding from Congress and explain how the National Applied Mathematics Laboratories would work with other government agencies. One minor point to resolve was the location of the new Computation Laboratory. Curtiss had stated that the laboratory might be located in either New York or Washington, D.C., but Lowan wanted the laboratory to remain in New York. New York was the nation’s financial capital, headquarters to much of its industry, close to the bulk of its major universities, and the home of the American Mathematical Society. It was also the city in which Arnold Lowan lived and the place where he held a second job, his professorship at Yeshiva University.

  In the summer of 1947, Curtiss announced that the Mathematical Tables Project would have to move to Washington, D.C., as it was “an integral part of the National Bureau of Standards, rather than a field office.”68 Arnold Lowan immediately protested the decision and claimed that it would cause “complete demoralization of our personnel.”69 Indeed, outside observers could detect that something was wrong that summer, even though the staff kept to their tasks. The computers were “so upset that they didn’t know what to do,” reported Everett Yowell of the Thomas J. Watson Computing Bureau.70 Yowell’s presence at the project offices was the first cooperation between the two New York computing institutions, and it should have been another sign that the Mathematical Tables Project was finally becoming part of the scientific community. With so many staff members preoccupied with the potential move, it was an opportunity lost. Yowell largely interacted only with Milton Abramowitz, teaching him some punched card techniques to earn “a little extra money.”71

  Believing that he was fighting one more time for the survival of the Mathematical Tables Project, Arnold Lowan again turned to his scientific allies: Philip Morse, John von Neumann, Julius Stratton, and R. C. Archibald. Letters came from Lowan’s home in Brooklyn, marked “Personal” and bearing the now familiar tag line, “For obvious reasons I would appreciate your keeping this letter in strict confidence.”72 With Phil Morse, he explored the possibility of bringing the Mathematical Tables Project under the authority of the Atomic Energy Commission and moving the group to the new Brookhaven Laboratory on Long Island. After discussing the idea with friends on the Atomic Energy Commission, Morse reported that Brookhaven would not accept the computing group. He never mentioned whether the Atomic Energy Commission was at all interested in the Mathematical Tables Project but instead reported that the new laboratory, which was located in an area then considered quite isolated, could not provide housing for the computers.73 Turning next to John von Neumann, Lowan suggested that the staff of the Mathematical Tables Project might work as a computing office for the Institute for Advanced Study, though of course they would remain in New York. Von Neumann, who was already planning to build his own electronic computer, never raised the issue with his colleagues at the institute, writing that “my own impression is that the Institute is not a suitable vehicle for such a function.”74

  As rejection followed rejection, Lowan’s letters became more frequent, more urgent, more desperate. Through the winter of 1947–48, Morse was the recipient of four letters, each more anxious than the last. Lowan described his problems yet again, asked why he had received no reply, requested a meeting with his supporter, and finally begged for any contact.75 “I have reason to believe that Dr. Curtiss intends to proceed with his plan of either transferring the [Computation Laboratory] to Washington even at the risk of wrecking it,” he wrote, “or to curtail it considerably by even abolishing some of the jobs of the mathematicians.”76 His writing became tinged with self-pity, as the legacy of the Mathematical Tables Project became intertwined with every little slight that he had felt as its leader. He complained that he had been denied a promotion, that Curtiss had already appointed his successor, that his accomplishments were being ignored.77

  Finding no aid from his traditional supporters, Lowan looked outside the scientific community for any assistance that might be offered. He turned first to the New York City congressional delegation and asked for help from Representatives Emmanuel Cellars of Brooklyn and Jacob Javits of Manhattan. The two congressmen wrote to the leaders of the National Bureau of Standards, presented Lowan’s arguments, and asked for an explanation. Both congressmen got polite responses from John Curtiss that offered no compromise on his plan to move the Mathematical Tables Project to Washington.78

  As the date for the move approached, Arnold Lowan asked for the assistance of the union that represented his human computers, the United Public Workers of America. The United Public Workers had organized the Mathematical Tables Project computers in 1938 as part of a broader effort to represent the clerical workers of the WPA. The union was on the more radical side of 1930s labor organizations. It was a member of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and kept its offices in the same building that housed the American Communist Party. It had mounted at least one strike against the WPA, in 1939, though the correspondence of Arnold Lowan suggests that the labor action spared the Mathematical Tables Project.79

  The United Public Workers followed the lead of Arnold Lowan in pressing its case. They contacted Cellars and Javits in Congress, R. C. Archibald and Phil Morse in the scientific community, John Curtiss and the senior scientists of the National Bureau of Standards. The union’s first letters were polite and deferential. “The employees of the Computation Laboratory appreciate the interest you have shown in the problem of its location,” the union president wrote to Phil Morse. “May we take the liberty of writing to you once more on the subject.”80 The union argued that the planned move would destroy jobs and damage the legacy of the Mathematical Tables Project. “It may never be possible,” wrote the president, “to fully make up for the loss of skilled personnel that the move would entail.”81

  42. Phil Morse in his computing laboratory after the war

  Subsequent letters were not so deferential to the authority of the scientists. The union attacked John Curtiss and portrayed him as naive, opportunistic, and prejudiced. Quoting a memo that had been supplied by Lowan, the union president charged that “twenty per cent of the present employees of the [Mathematical Tables Project] who are Negroes are not expected to go to Washington because of the Jim Crow conditions existing there.” Furthermore, “fifty percent of the employees are Jewish and fear increased discrimination in Washington.”82 The charges had more than a grain of truth, for Washington was a segregated city. “White-collar work and employment in skilled trades dominated in Washington,” wrote one historian of the city, “but access to such jobs was anything but equal racially.”83 The letter stirred only one scientist to action, the volatile R. C. Archibald. Archibald, who had praised the Mathematical Tables Project in the pages of Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation and in Science, took up his pen to rail against “the attempted transfer of the [Mathematical Tables Project] from New York to Washington” and the “brutal treatment of Lowan” at the hands of John Curtiss, whom he characterized as “not even a second rate mathematician.”84

  Neither the United Public Workers nor R. C. Archibald could keep the Mathematical Tables Project in New York City. The death blow for the group was delivered by John von Neumann, who wrote one final letter at the request of Arnold Lowan. In the letter, von Neumann told John Curtiss that he had “always had a great admiration for the work of the Mathematical Tables Project–Computation Laboratory” and added, “I think that this organization constituted and still constitutes an ideal computing g
roup on the non-automatic level.” He felt that the project had done “very excellent and valuable work in the past, and is likely to do so in the future.” The strong tone of the letter began to waver when von Neumann suggested “that a group of this type will become obsolescent when automatic devices become widely distributed,” and it collapsed in the last paragraph, when he deferred to Curtiss’s judgment. “If you are satisfied that [it is impossible to fund the group in New York], then I concur with you that a gradual transfer to Washington is the only possible solution.”85

  Arnold Lowan probably never read von Neumann’s letter, but he knew that its effect was “extremely unfavorable.” After receiving the letter and meeting with the members of the Mathematical Tables Project, John Curtiss announced that the move would begin immediately and that the punched card unit would be the first group transferred to Washington. He offered jobs to most members of the planning committee and to eighteen of the human computers, about half of a staff working in New York.86 In order to limit Arnold Lowan’s ability to thwart the move, Curtiss offered two alternatives to the project leader. Lowan could come to Washington, take charge of the new Computation Laboratory, and receive a promotion. If he did not wish to do that, Lowan could remain in New York as the director of a fifteen-person computing office. The Bureau of Standards would provide funds for exactly one year. After that, Lowan would have to finance the group himself.87