When Computers Were Human (15 page)

Prior to the war, the method of least squares was not widely used in the survey office because the calculations were long and arduous. It was much simpler to adjust the values by instinct and trust the judgment of the computers. The calculations for least squares required two steps. First, the computer had to prepare what were called “condition equations” or “normal equations.” A typical problem would adjust twenty-five values in a survey spread over two or three square miles. In all, there might be two or three hundred measurements that had been made by the surveyors that had to be reduced into twenty-five condition equations, one for each of the values being adjusted. The second step disassembles the condition equations in a messy series of calculations. The process can be compared to the job of disassembling a steel-frame building, moving it to a new site, and reconstructing it in a slightly different shape. As the building is reassembled in its new form, each girder needs to be adjusted with a cut or an extension. Like the process of moving a building, least squares computations required detailed record keeping. Any mistake in either the records or the arithmetic required the computer to begin the process again.
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The English translation of
Theoria Motus Corporum
did much to promote the method of least squares, but it described a plan for the computations that was slow and redundant. A computer knowing only the plans described by Gauss would resist any large problem.
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In the United States, the method became widely used only after a Coast Survey computer named Myrrick Doolittle (1830–1911) developed a more efficient means of doing the calculations.

Doolittle was yet another student of Benjamin Peirce, though he had
come to Peirce later in life. He had been born in Vermont and lacked the time or the money or the inclination to attend college. Proving to be a natural teacher, he had begun his career by instructing the children of friends and neighbors. At the age of 26, he accepted a position at the New Jersey Normal College and remained there until the onset of the war.
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Deciding that it was time for him to get a degree, he enrolled at Antioch College in Ohio. Antioch was a small religious college that embraced the abolitionist cause with all the fervor of the age. He studied at the college for two years and was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1862. That summer Doolittle volunteered for an Ohio regiment in the Union army, only to find “his physical condition preventing enlistment.”
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He remained at the college for one more year as a mathematics instructor and then left to join Peirce at Harvard.

We have no record of Doolittle's life in Cambridge. Given the nature of his mathematical interests, it seems likely that he spent some time in the Nautical Almanac Office with the computers, but he stayed less than twelve months with Peirce. In 1864, he left Massachusetts without completing a degree in order to join his wife, Lucy Doolittle, who was working in Washington, D.C. She was a volunteer with the Sanitary Commission, a precursor of the Red Cross.
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With the help of Benjamin Peirce, Doolittle took a job at the Naval Observatory as an assistant observer. He found the observatory work “wearying,” as the job required him to record the positions of stars by night and to reduce observations by day. Deciding that he wanted to live a less taxing life, he resigned his position and took a job at the Patent Office examining the applications for patents on steam boilers.
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During Doolittle's time at the Patent Office, Benjamin Peirce came to Washington as the director of the Coast Survey. Peirce surprised both his friends and his detractors by proving to be a competent manager. He demonstrated that he could schedule survey crews, approve new projects, draft budgets, and work with members of Congress. He also found time among the demands of his official duties to conduct mathematical research. He returned to the classical problem of mathematical astronomy, the three-body problem, and developed a new way to compute the motion of the moon. He requested that the Computing Division prepare a table of the moon's position from his equations, but this work had to be suspended “for want of a sufficient and adequate force of computers.” He was able to complete the tables only when he convinced the secretary of the navy to allocate an extra $2,000 to pay the salaries of three new computers.
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Peirce also experimented with a new form of arithmetic which used only two symbols, 0 and 1, instead of the ten digits of decimal arithmetic. Eventually named “binary arithmetic,” it would be the basis of electronic
computing machines, though such machines were seventy-five years in the future and beyond the vision of Benjamin Peirce. “I have no such extravagant thought as that of a substitute for our decimal system,” he wrote, though he believed that it might be interesting to compute “some of the fundamental numbers of science by a new arithmetic for the purpose of comparison and verification.”
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13. Benjamin Peirce, director of Coast Survey Office

In 1873, Peirce offered Doolittle an appointment as a computer. According to his family, this appointment brought Doolittle “into his life's work.”
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He quickly came to dominate the Computing Division, though he never became its formal leader. He was not a mathematician after the manner of Benjamin Peirce or even Charles Henry Davis, but he had an innate grasp of calculation and was able to produce concise, simple computing plans. In 1874, he turned his attention to the calculation of least squares. He did nothing to the method itself, but he found a simpler procedure for handling the computations. He reduced the redundancies in Gauss's procedure, dropping calculations that were handled in other ways. The result was a plan that was more orderly and more efficient. In effect, he found a way of taking down the girders and reassembling them with the fewest steps. “The results reached appear very satisfactory,” reported the director of the computing floor.
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The technique became the standard method of computation at the Coast Survey. It removed the old judgments from survey adjustment and the old “gentlemen in private life” from the computing floor.

In the two decades that followed the end of the Civil War, women began to find a place in the computing rooms. Just as their male counterparts were no longer educated gentlemen, these women were not Maria Mitchells or Nicole-Reine Lepautes, the talented daughters of loving fathers or the intelligent friends of sympathetic men. They were workers, desk laborers, who were earning their way in this world with their skill at numbers. In many ways, they were similar to the female office workers, who were increasingly common in the nation's cities. Before the war, offices were closed to women, except for those well-nurtured daughters, loyal helpmates, or resilient widows. The war had opened government offices to women, as the federal agencies needed more clerical workers than they could draw from the dwindling pool of male labor. Many of these first female clerks were, in fact, war widows, women who had married in the first exciting days of the conflict and lost their husbands on some hallowed battlefield in Tennessee or Virginia. These women earned a meager salary from the government that often had to support children and mothers in addition to the worker herself.
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Women began finding employment with private companies after the war ended in 1865. The nature of business had expanded with the war, had become more complex, and now required central office staffs to coordinate production. Business skills were taught at high schools, a new innovation in public education. These skills were similar to those needed by human computers, though clerks did not need to understand the calculus of Newton. Both clerks and computers were subordinate to a professional staff, both were paid a small wage, and both handled routine
work. By 1875, one out of six hundred office workers was female, and within a decade, women would fill one out of fifty office jobs.
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In 1875, Anna Winlock (1857–1904) approached the Harvard Observatory and asked if she might be employed in calculation. Winlock was the eldest daughter of Joseph Winlock, the director of the Harvard Observatory and the former superintendent of the Nautical Almanac. Joseph Winlock had unexpectedly succumbed to a brief illness, leaving behind a widow and five children with no obvious means of support. The officers of Harvard had been kind and gracious. They had given Mrs. Winlock a decent interval to vacate the house on the observatory grounds and had helped her to find a new home in Cambridge.
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Once they felt that the new widow was settled, they ceased all financial support of the family.
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It fell to Anna Winlock, the eldest child at eighteen years of age, to sustain the family. Winlock had been close to her father in much the same way that Maria Mitchell had been close to William Mitchell. She had watched him work at the almanac office and learned from his example the rudiments of mathematical astronomy. When Anna Winlock was twelve years old, she had been her father's companion on an expedition to view an eclipse of the sun. The party left Cambridge and traveled southwest to Kentucky in order to make its camp. The young girl was probably included because the trip passed through the country of her father's birth. Along the way, the senior Winlock introduced his daughter to his various cousins and sisters and aunts. Nonetheless, the expedition was a time with the astronomers, an opportunity to prepare instruments and observe an eclipse.
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Joseph Winlock had left the Harvard Observatory volumes of unreduced observations, a decade of numbers in a useless state. The interim director complained that he could not process the data, as “the condition of the funds is an objection to hiring anyone.”
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At this point, Anna Winlock presented herself to the observatory and offered to reduce the observations. Harvard was able to offer her twenty-five cents an hour to do the computations. Winlock found the conditions acceptable and took the position.
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In less than a year, she was joined at the observatory by three other women. The first was Selina Bond, the daughter of her father's predecessor. Like Winlock, Bond stood in need of a steady income, as her father's fortune had been squandered through the actions of a “rascally trustee.” The second, Rhoda Saunders, was the graduate of a local high school who had been recommended to the observatory by the Harvard president. The last was probably the relative of an assistant astronomer.
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By 1880, the Harvard Observatory employed a complete staff of female computers. The director who hired this staff, Edward C. Pickering (1846–1919), is often considered progressive and liberal for employing
women. He was called a “true Victorian gentleman in his attitude towards women and to everyone, men and women alike,” by one of his computers.
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Pickering worked closely with a female benefactor, Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, to finance the activities of the observatory, and he encouraged an assistant to teach mathematical astronomy at Radcliffe College, the new women's school affiliated with Harvard.
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Yet Pickering was motivated as much by economy as by altruism. “To attain the greatest efficiency,” he wrote, “a skillful observer should never be obliged to spend time on what could be done equally well by an assistant at a much lower salary.”
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The salary he offered to the women was half the prevailing rate for calculation. “[The Harvard] computers are largely women,” complained the director of the Naval Observatory in Washington, “who can be got to work for next to nothing.”
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14. Computing room of the Harvard Observatory

“Pickering's Harem,” as the group would occasionally be called, served as an uncomfortable example to the government computing agencies.
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When the secretary of the navy asked why the Naval Observatory could not reduce its expenses for computation, as the Harvard Observatory had done, he was met with a defensive reply from the superintendent. He claimed that the Naval Observatory paid “its employees at exactly the same (or in some cases less) rate as in other branches of the
Government Service,” deftly deflecting the issue of hiring women. Shifting to a more aggressive position, he argued, “To charge extravagance against the Observatory because its employees are paid according to a rate fixed by law for the public service at large is clearly disingenuous and tending to mislead.”
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The Naval Observatory would not hire a female computer until 1901.
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The Coast Survey and the Nautical Almanac, who had benefited from the labors of Maria Mitchell, were slightly more progressive and hired their second female computers in 1893. However, the Nautical Almanac was self-conscious about this action and identified its new employee as a man.
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