When Computers Were Human (25 page)

From the start, the computations went badly. The “difficulties in long range correspondence about the many technical details were very great,” Veblen observed.
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The computers had not observed the firings and did not understand all of the data. Some of the shots seemed anomalous and the results contradictory. The ballistics formulas were confusing, and Veblen's instructions were incomplete. In early March, the computers asked Veblen to come to Sandy Hook and help them with the calculations. After he returned to Aberdeen, they requested a second visit. Ten days later, with the tables still incomplete, they asked for one more session. On this last trip, Veblen worked with the computers until the calculations were done. The four of them finished checking the results a few hours before dawn on the morning of March 26. Veblen's diary for the day contained the single line “3:00
A
.
M
. Finished tables.”
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This first project was an opportunity for Veblen to experience every step that was needed to gather ballistics data and create range tables, an opportunity to learn the problems of ballistics calculation. He seemed to have learned his lessons well, for his new computing staff at Aberdeen never had this kind of frustrating experience. He transferred the three Sandy Hook computers to the new proving ground in order to form the core of the new group. Their efforts were augmented by three Princeton graduate students. To oversee this group, he recruited Joseph Ritt (1893–1951) and gave him the title “Master Computer.” Ritt was a professor of mathematics at Columbia University and Veblen's link to the old, traditional computing labs.
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In 1911, Ritt had spent a year as a member of the Coast and Geodetic Survey computing floor. The group had a new name, the Department of Longitude, but its methods and procedures were little changed. Myrrick Doolittle, who had become the grand old man of scientific
calculation, arrived in his office every day to adjust triangulation surveys, as he had thirty years before.
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From the Coast Survey, Ritt moved to the combined Computing Division of the Naval Observatory. At the observatory, he spent one year reducing data for the astronomers and a second year preparing ephemerides for the Nautical Almanac Office.

Though he chose a Master Computer who had been trained at conventional computing offices, Veblen did not follow the traditional model for computing floors. He placed computers on the firing ranges of Aberdeen and put them “under the direct observation of the firing officers.”
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The first facility to include a computing staff was called the “water range” because the shells overflew an island and landed in the Chesapeake Bay. The range was not completely finished when it began testing guns in April 1918. Veblen remembered: “It was necessary to haul ammunition and guns over roads which were often two feet deep in mud. The only conveyance which was able to get through was a six-mule team. Even the Ford was powerless.”
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One computer would hike or ride a horse to the gun mount. Two or three others would take a small boat to observation towers on the far side of the bay. These computers had a telephone connection to the range officers, who notified them of each firing so that they could time the length of flight.
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From measurements of the splash made by the shell, they would compute the length of the shot and its deviation to the left or right.

Following the shots, the observing computers would phone these numbers to the computer at the gun mount. The computer reduced the data to standard conditions using the air temperature, gun temperature, humidity, jump of the barrel, direction of the wind, and other factors. Under this system, Veblen reported, “it is possible to know the results of any firing for range [distance] within a few minutes after the last shot was fired.” At the end of the day, after the boat picked up the observers, the range computer would take the day's calculations back to the central computing lab, where the staff would complete the work. Veblen confessed that the lab was really nothing more than a “small shack” that was “ordered for this section [the computing group] on Friday morning and the section moved in on Saturday afternoon.”
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Veblen implemented this plan on all of the Aberdeen ranges, though some of the facilities lacked proper equipment. On one of the antiaircraft fire ranges, before the computers acquired range finders, they resorted to techniques that might have been borrowed from Francis Galton or a scientist of Laputa. They would fire the shells vertically into the night sky and photograph the bursts against the background of the fixed stars. After the photographs were developed, the computers would measure the distance between the shell burst and the stars. With this data, they would
use the tables of the nautical almanac to compute the altitude of the burst.
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Aberdeen had no residences for women and hence had no female computers. The only women who worked at the base were a pair of secretaries, who were forbidden to spend the night at the proving ground.
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The army began hiring female computers only when it opened an office of experimental ballistics in Washington, D.C. This office was directed by Major Forest Ray Moulton (1872–1952), who was a professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago before he accepted a reserve commission. Moulton took the job of preparing ballistics materials for ordnance officers. In the spring of 1918, he was given an office in a temporary building on the Washington Mall and told to hire a staff. As other officers had already discovered, Moulton found it difficult to hire enough men, so he offered positions to women.

The young women of 1918 could not attend the special training summer camps, volunteer for a Canadian regiment, or even fire a 12-inch gun at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Though they were generally enthusiastic about the war, their feelings were checked by the roles that they were offered in the conflict. The first year of the war was also the year of women's suffrage, the year that a corps of committed women moved to Washington, D.C., in order to win the right to vote. While the men were preparing to fight in France, women were picketing the White House, lobbying the members of Congress, and marching up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. One congressional aide recalled seeing “cultured, intellectual women arrested and dragged off to prison because of their method of giving publicity to what they believed to be the truth.”
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The suffrage movement surrounded the world of Elizabeth Webb Wilson (1896–1980). Wilson was the daughter of a Washington physician, a flaxen-haired, dimple-cheeked member of the capital's wealthy classes. She studied mathematics at George Washington University, a school just a few blocks west of the White House. Her daily trolley ride took her past the lobbyists, the pickets, and the marches. Like herself, many of the suffrage leaders were the daughters of physicians. As far as we know, she took no part in the effort that ultimately caused President Wilson to endorse the suffrage amendment, Congress to approve the measure, and the states, one by one, to give their consent. Yet, in the spring of 1918, she took her own small stand for women's equality. When she heard that the federal government would employ women in war offices, she applied for a job that would “release a man for the front.” It was the “patriotic thing to do,” she recalled. But when she was offered a position, she refused it on the ground that it was “insufficiently mathematical.” She had been the top mathematics student in her graduating class, the first woman to win the school's mathematics prize. Though her college peers had judged her
a quiet and timid woman, she stood her ground and stated that she would only take a war job where her mathematical talents “could be utilized to the fullest.”
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The personnel office offered her a second position, which she also declined, and then a third. In all, she rejected nine jobs before accepting an appointment as Moulton's chief computer.

21. Elizabeth Webb Wilson in the spring of 1917

Elizabeth Wilson's persistence was a small victory for feminism. Washington had already established itself as a city of opportunity for single
women. The novelist John Dos Passos described contemporary stenography offices in the capital, where “the typewriters would trill and jingle and all the girls' fingers would go like mad typing briefs, manuscripts of undelivered speeches by lobbyists, occasionally overflow from a newspaperman or a scientist.”
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A woman could earn seventeen or twenty dollars a week, enough to pay the rent on her own apartment, send some money to her family, and have enough left to occasionally purchase clothes from one of the finer department stores. The Washington office of experimental ballistics employed both men and women and put them in situations where they had to work together. The computing staff had sixteen workers and was split equally between female and male. Like Wilson, the other seven women were the offspring of prosperous homes and graduates of coeducational schools with strong mathematics programs. Two of the women had studied at the University of Chicago, two at Brown University, and one each at Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Columbia University.
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The staff of the Washington ballistics office stood midway between the mathematicians and engineers of Aberdeen and the officers in the army's artillery corps. Using data from the Aberdeen ranges, they prepared tables and documents for those who would actually command the guns in battle. The work was often sensitive or political in nature, requiring Moulton to negotiate among different branches of the military to establish standard operating procedures. “As a consequence of the various interests involved,” he wrote about one problem, the work “had to be taken up somewhat formally.”
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In this environment, the mathematicians worked closely with the computers to prepare material that was both accurate and appropriate for the situation. During Wilson's first weeks in the office, she and Moulton had to prepare a range table for a French gun firing American ammunition. Wilson demonstrated “both personal mastery of the technical operations involved,” wrote one of the mathematicians in the office, “and skill in supervising and checking the work of others.”
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Reflecting on the experience, Moulton saw an unusual camaraderie between the mathematicians and the computers. “The unfailing courtesy and the evidence of mutual helpfulness which were manifested in numerous ways,” he wrote, “were inspired not alone by military customs and the proprieties of the situation, but much more by sincere mutual respect and personal regard.” Wilson, the only member of the office staff from Washington, acquired the role of chief computer and social leader. She hosted a dinner for the office staff at her parents' home and a party at her father's club.
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When the ballistics computers recalled their service in the First World War, they would remember the summer of 1918. “It would be difficult to
gather in any way an equal number of individuals who would have more in common and whose relations would have been more harmonious,” wrote Moulton.
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The number of firings at Aberdeen increased each day, and the data flowed from the gun mounts to the proving ground's computing building and from there to the experimental ballistics office in Washington. Veblen spent much of the summer traveling in search of new computers, but whenever possible, he would catch an early train back to Aberdeen so that he could join the artillery crews on the range. He would fire the guns until the dimming light made further observations impossible.
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He recruited mathematical talent from universities, from industry, and even from the offices of the
Encyclopedia Americana
. “The demand was immediate,” remembered one computer, so “[I] terminated my [job]. I took the next train to New York, where I changed for Aberdeen.”
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In less than two months, Veblen added twenty-three graduate students or new PhDs to his staff, bringing the total number of computers at Aberdeen to thirty. Twice that summer, the army engineers had to double the size of the computing building.
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During those months, the computers gathered range data for naval guns mounted on railroad cars, tested new designs of streamlined shells, and uncovered a major design flaw in existing shells, a problem that Moulton judged to be “so great that the guns were of little value.”
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Yet the problem that most interested them was a major revision of Siacci's ballistics theory. “Upon entering the army,” wrote Moulton, “a hasty examination of the classical ballistic methods showed … that they were wholly inadequate for current demands.” He argued that Siacci's analysis “contained defects of reasoning, some quite erroneous conclusions, and the results were arrived at by singularly awkward methods.”
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His criticisms were unduly harsh, as the First World War armies were using the theory for problems that Siacci had not foreseen. Siacci had not planned for the problems of high-altitude fire, antiaircraft guns, and long-range artillery, nor had he anticipated that an army might have at its disposal a staff of forty-six human computers.