When Computers Were Human (29 page)

The largest table in the series filled eight volumes. It possessed the grand title
Logarithmetica Britannica
and embodied the nationalism that had contributed to the start of the Great War. “When it came to my knowledge that the French proposed to issue a fourteen figure table and the Germans a fifteen figure table,” Pearson wrote, “it seemed to me that it was fitting that the land wherein logarithms were cradled should rise to the occasion and issue a standard table … to twenty figures.” Through most of the nineteenth century, computers had used logarithm tables to simplify calculations by turning multiplication into addition. When the
Observatory Pinafore
computers sang of using the tables of Crelle, they were referring to the use of logarithms for astronomical calculation. By 1919, logarithms had only a limited role in scientific calculation, as they had been replaced by calculating machines. Pearson claimed that people who used ordinary logarithm tables for calculation “are either ignorant of the existence of slide-rules and mechanical calculators or else unfortunately cannot afford them.” The one use he saw for logarithms was in high-precision calculations, and it was for that reason that he agreed to publish the twenty place values of the
Logarithmetica Britannica
. It was not, he said, “an enterprise of profit.”
⁵¹

Pearson hoped to publish at least one tract describing the features of calculating machines and the techniques of machine operation, but he
never found the time to write such a pamphlet or identified anyone else to do the job. The first part of this work, the description of the machines, was already covered in a German book,
Die Rechenmaschinen
(
The Calculating Machines
).
⁵²
The second part, far more difficult to write, required contributions from many individuals, as no one could claim to be an expert operator of all calculating machines.
⁵³

The
Tracts for Computers
probably achieved the goals that Pearson set for them. Judging from the worn condition of most library copies, we can conclude that at least some of those computers who came of age between 1920 and 1939 learned their lessons from the wartime staff of the Galton Laboratory. At the same time, these little booklets received no critical response from the scientific community. Few scientific journals printed notices of their publication, and only one or two offered reviews of the pamphlets. Even the mathematicians most qualified to pass judgment, such as those who had served at Aberdeen, expressed no opinion on the series.
⁵⁴
They were simply part of the war production, part of the contribution that computers had offered to the conflict.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Fruits of the Conflict: Machinery 1922

T
HE ARMISTICE LEFT
the United States with a vast pool of equipment, energy, and vision. Beginning in the winter of 1919, train after train arrived at the Aberdeen Proving Ground with field artillery pieces that had been built for a final offensive into Germany. The proving ground staff unloaded the weapons, one by one, and towed them to the large fields where Oswald Veblen had conducted his first range tests. They placed the guns in long, straight lines to await the next war to end all wars. As the army was starting a period of slow decline, they sat in winter snows and summer heat, leaving the base only when some veterans' lodge requested a gun to use as a lawn decoration or to serve as a memorial to fallen comrades.

The trains carried surplus punched card tabulators and sorters and punches north from the government office buildings to the warehouses of the Computing, Tabulating and Recording Company in New York. “Rising inventories became a problem in 1919 and 1920,” wrote historian James Cortada, “before commercial enterprises could sift production back to civilian levels.”
¹
Unlike the field artillery in storage at Aberdeen, some of this equipment would form the basis for a new class of scientific computing laboratory, a type of laboratory that would combine the tabulators with the expertise of human computers. Two veterans of the Food Administration would shape this new kind of computing facility, Henry A. Wallace and Howard Tolley (1889–1958).

Howard Tolley was one of the last links to Myrrick Doolittle and, through him, to Benjamin Peirce. He had come to Washington in 1910 and become a computer for the Coast and Geodetic Survey office. “[The job] consisted of sitting in an office up … on Capitol Hill and running a computing machine,” he later wrote, “computing such things as the latitude and longitude of particular triangulation stations in different parts of the United States and computing the altitude of different hilltops and mountaintops.”
²
Doolittle was only a few years from retirement, but he was still a guiding force in the office and taught the new computers his
method of computing least squares adjustments to surveys. Tolley was initially intrigued with this work, thinking that it was “the only part that required any knowledge of real mathematics,” but before long he recognized that the calculations “follow[ed] a regular fixed routine, requiring no judgement.”
³
After a few months of adjusting surveys, Tolley tired of the work. “What is there to this?” he complained. “I [would] come over to the office every morning at nine o'clock and I [would] work on computing these things, adding, multiplying, running these computing machines, deciphering what's in the books of these surveyors.” The job paid $100 a month, a sum that had been unchanged for nearly twenty-five years. “In effect it's all spent before I draw it, and I [had] a pretty hard time keeping good clothes on my back.”
⁴

24. Howard Tolley (back row right) and Henry A. Wallace (front row center) at U.S. Department of Agriculture

Tolley's frustration was compounded by the knowledge that the major surveys of the North American continent were complete and that he was only handling refinements and detailed adjustments. “Just being a computer in the Coast and Geodetic Survey was completely futile,” he later remembered; “it wasn't helping the world any.” He considered returning to college for graduate study or even joining a survey team for the Alaska
railroad, but he concluded that graduate study was expensive and that the surveyors “didn't want a desk mathematician.”
⁵
One morning, when Tolley was chatting with his supervisor in the Coast and Geodetic Survey offices, he learned that the Department of Agriculture was seeking a general-purpose mathematician to work on some “problems that were related to genetics—Mendelianism,—and on some that were related to the capacity of farm silos.”
⁶
When he went to interview for the job, Tolley discovered that the Department of Agriculture was most interested in what he had learned from Doolittle, the “knowledge of least squares and the adjustment of observations.”
⁷
He accepted a position with the department and worked on a number of issues that were fundamentally economic in nature. During the war, he assisted Raymond Pearl with the statistical work of the Food Administration and, in 1921, became one of the first members of the department's new Bureau of Agricultural Economics.
⁸

In January 1921, the United States inaugurated a new president, Warren G. Harding, and the Department of Agriculture welcomed a new secretary, Harry C. Wallace. One of Wallace's first acts was to create a new research office called the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. This office collected together all the employees of the department, including Howard Tolley, who were engaged in studying problems of production, markets, and financing. Within this group, Tolley promoted the method of least squares as a means of analyzing agricultural data. This application of least squares was substantially different from its use in survey adjustment, even though the method of calculation was unchanged. In agricultural studies, least squares did not adjust data. Instead, it took data apart in order to identify underlying causes or forces. It could identify the effect of fertilizer on crops or the feed that increased the weight of farm animals. It was sometimes called “regression analysis” or “the analysis of variance.”

In the fall of 1922, Tolley gave a series of lectures in order to introduce the staff of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics to the ideas of statistical least squares.
⁹
Tolley illustrated the theory with an example that concerned the damage done to cotton crops by the boll weevil. His data, gathered in the southern states by agents of the department, contained the extent of damage on each field, the typical size of the cotton plants, the time of year, the amount of rain recorded in the area, and the daytime temperature. Using least squares analysis, Tolley showed how it was possible to determine which of these factors were present in the most heavily damaged fields. According to his results, the plants were most vulnerable at a certain stage of their development.
¹⁰

Though the method of least squares promised much to the agricultural researchers, it was of little use unless the department could provide a
computing office. The calculations were every bit as daunting as the least squares calculations of survey adjustment. A survey calculation would be done only once. A least squares analysis of a specific problem might have to be repeated every season. Tolley believed that at least some of the calculations might be handled with punched card equipment. In agricultural statistics, as in survey adjustment, least squares computations had two distinctly different parts. The first part reduced the data to a series of normal equations. By itself, this activity was especially demanding for agricultural researchers, as they were often dealing with large collections of data that spanned counties or states or regions. The punched card equipment of 1922 could summarize data for many applications, but it needed to be used in a special way for least squares calculations. The normal equations required multiplications, and punched card tabulators could only compute sums. There was a simple way to force the machine to perform multiplications, but it required a skilled and attentive operator. The method, called progressive digiting, reduced multiplication to primitive additions. A simple product, such as 24 × 127, would require six cards. Four cards would have the number 127 punched on them. The other two would have the number 1270. To compute the product, the tabulator would sum the six cards.

When applied to real problems, progressive digiting seemed to be an awkward process, a complicated operation that should have been straightforward. It was something akin to counting the number of sheep in a field by summing the number of legs, adding the number of ears, and dividing the result by six. To handle real problems, operators had to punch multiple cards, sort them, sum them in a tabulator, shift the values, and sum again. It was difficult work, but it was faster and more accurate than the alternative of doing the computations by hand. For large collections of data, those that had been gathered from one thousand or two thousand farms, the punched card equipment provided the only practical way of preparing the normal equations.

Punched card technology offered no help with the second step of least squares analysis, the step of processing the normal equations. The only way to do it was to give the numbers from the tabulating equipment to a staff of human computers and let them complete the work. They would use a mechanical calculating machine and the mathematical method invented by Myrrick Doolittle some forty years before.
¹¹
Even with Doolittle's method, this part could be time-consuming. Tolley advised researchers to minimize the labor by doing all calculations with only two digits after the decimal point. He defended this procedure by noting that agricultural research was imprecise and that “astronomical accuracy is really not necessary.”
¹²

After teaching his class on least squares analysis, Howard Tolley
moved to create a central computing laboratory for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, an office that had punched card equipment and the expertise to perform least squares calculations.
¹³
In 1922, three separate offices of the bureau had punched card equipment, but none of them was fully utilizing its equipment. “The installation of the Cost of Marketing Division is busy most of the time,” he reported, but “that in the Division of Land Economics about half the time, and that in the Division of Statistical and Historical Research something like one-third of the time.” His research suggested that none of these computing offices really understood how to prepare a problem for machine tabulation and that at least one office had started problems that it had been unable to complete.
¹⁴