When Computers Were Human (36 page)

Bennett had some initial success organizing the MTAC committee, but
he was unable to give the work the kind of effort and attention that it deserved. He wrote to the Galton Laboratory at the University of London to enquire about the plans of Karl Pearson. Pearson's son replied that his father had died the year before but that he had left a great deal of material which might be used by the new committee. Bennett also asked a half dozen individuals, including H. T. Davis and L. J. Comrie, to join him on the committee and help with the bibliography. Writing from Colorado, Davis exclaimed that “I am very much pleased to accept membership on this Committee because I believe sincerely in the importance of the project.”
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Comrie, however, was more circumspect. “Am I right in interpreting ‘Aids to Computation' as meaning calculating machines?” he asked.
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Only after Bennett assured him that such machines would have a place in the bibliography did he agree to serve.
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Comrie's ability to contribute to MTAC would be limited. The problem was not so much the economy as it was a fall from grace, a small lapse of judgment. In the winter of 1935–36, the British Admiralty discovered that Comrie had not been accurately reporting the activity of the Nautical Almanac Office. Comrie was convinced that his staff was too small and that he was unable to retain the best computers because of Admiralty personnel regulations. Unable to make his point through memos and arguments, he was trying to impress upon the Admiralty the shortcomings of their policies by delaying the release of important work. He told his supervisors that the almanac computers were overworked and unable to do certain computations when, in fact, those computations were already finished and residing in Comrie's files.
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The flaw in this strategy was exposed when an investigative board arrived unannounced at the almanac office. The board discovered the missing computations, charged Comrie with obstructing Admiralty work, and dismissed him.
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“Comrie's often-expressed complaints that the civil service regulations were petty and restrictive are given some justification by [the record],” observed historian Mary Croarken, “but it is also clear that Comrie was inept at ‘playing the game'” and working effectively within a large government organization.
⁸⁷

After his departure from the British
Nautical Almanac
, Comrie rented a building in London and formed a private computing laboratory, the Scientific Computing Service Ltd. The company grew quickly, sustained in no little part by computing contracts from the British government, including his former employer, the Admiralty. In less than a year, he employed a staff of sixteen computers, “most of whom have academic training,” he boasted. The company handled the same kinds of calculations that were done at the Nautical Almanac Office: navigation tables, astronomical calculations, statistical summaries. Looking for commercial business, it also advertised a specialty in the analysis of questionnaires
and “an advisory and investigational service relating to the purchase and use of calculating machines.”
⁸⁸

Though Comrie's new company prospered, his fall from grace had consequences. His scientific life was burdened with the need to satisfy bank officers, customers, and investors. He could no longer freely volunteer his time to scientific organizations, either the Subcommittee on the Bibliography for Mathematical Tables and Other Aids for Computation or the Mathematical Tables Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He could remain a member of both groups and could contribute to the work of each, but he could not afford to take a leadership role. In his new position, he had to earn his own way and support the economic prosperity of his company.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Scientific Relief

M
ALCOLM
M
ORROW
(1906–1982) was the faceless bureaucrat of computation, the government worker who created the largest human computing group of the 1930s but left little record of himself. He lived in a working-class district of Washington, D.C., only a few blocks from the original Naval Observatory and the building that had once housed Simon Newcomb's Nautical Almanac Office.
¹
He held jobs in several of the New Deal agencies and eventually settled into the executive office of the Work Projects Administration (WPA)
²
as an assistant statistician. His title gives us little information about his mathematical ability, as the WPA employed many assistant statisticians. Some were nothing more than clerks. Some were project managers. Some prepared questionnaires. Only a few were employed in the analysis of data.

Morrow's WPA was the largest and most developed of the New Deal's relief agencies. Formed in 1935, it was Franklin Roosevelt's third attempt to reduce unemployment through the construction of public works. The WPA operated offices in each of the forty-eight states, as well as an extra office in New York City, that provided funds for projects judged to be in the public good. The WPA paid for parks and bridges in New York City, sidewalks in Michigan, dams in Texas, city offices in Los Angeles, 226 hospitals, 1,000 libraries, 1,200 airport buildings, 2,700 firehouses, 9,300 auditoriums. WPA workers renovated the army's research facility at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, repaired the Naval Observatory in Washington, and constructed a new building for the Iowa State Statistical Laboratory.
³

In general, the WPA did not manage the projects that operated under its name. It provided only wages for workers. Local organizations would identify appropriate projects, develop plans, and pay for any necessary materials. Only rarely would the WPA staff in Washington plan and manage a project without the assistance of a local sponsor. Those projects that were directly overseen by the WPA tended to be national in scope, such as the Federal Theater Project and the Federal Writers' Project. The theater project supported performing arts across the country and proved
to be a controversial activity. While only a few of the theater productions had any political content, notably Orson Welles's
The Cradle Will Rock
and Sinclair Lewis's
It Can't Happen Here
, the project was the target of conservative critics who claimed that the government-supported artists were promoting liberal ideas and undermining American society. Eventually, the critics found enough support within Congress to terminate all WPA theatrical productions.

The writers' project generated less controversy, but it experienced serious operational problems. The project was intended to support regional authors by having them create guidebooks for each state of the union. The Washington WPA office provided a style manual that described how the “geographic, historic, cultural, social, recreational, industrial and commercial information should be assembled.” In spite of the best intentions, the project was unable to recruit sufficient regional talent to prepare the guides. Not wanting to see a visible project fail, the WPA administrators had many of the guidebooks rewritten “by experienced writers drawn from New York City and other centers, who were paid for their work on a non-relief basis.”
⁴

Among the tens of thousands of WPA projects, there were about 2,400 that supported scientific research. Future Nobel laureates Glenn Seaborg and Luis Alvarez at the University of California are on the list of those who received WPA assistance.
⁵
WPA funds paid the salaries of laboratory workers in much the same way that the National Youth Administration had provided funds for student assistants. Most WPA-sponsored science involved large statistical studies of social or economic problems.
⁶
Malcolm Morrow's division of the WPA, the Central Statistical Office, oversaw most of these projects. This office suggested possible studies, reviewed proposals from universities and state agencies, and granted funds that would pay for workers to conduct surveys, collect information, tabulate data, and analyze the results. The Iowa State Statistical Laboratory was a major beneficiary of the Central Statistical Office. It received WPA money to summarize harvests, measure farm income, and analyze the extent of rural poverty.
⁷

Sometime early in the operation of the WPA, perhaps in the summer of 1935 or the winter of 1936, the staff of the Central Statistical Office became engaged in a discussion of mathematical tables. As they were starting to oversee a large number of statistical studies, they thought that it might be useful to provide a standard set of mathematical tables to each of the projects and to each of the regional WPA offices. If all of the statistical projects had the same tables of logarithms and probability functions, then the Central Statistical Office could compare the results of the different studies with a little more confidence. This idea produced no immediate action, as the office had more pressing things to do, but it was revived
in the fall of 1937 when the nation entered a new period of economic hardship. After three years of tentative growth, the economy had begun a contraction that was quickly labeled the “Roosevelt Recession.” Faced with growing unemployment and greater labor unrest, the WPA began looking for new projects in order to expand the number of relief jobs. With winter approaching, they needed to identify activities that could operate during the cold months.
⁸
The construction jobs, which constituted 75 percent of the WPA projects, were curtailed between late fall and early spring. As WPA officials evaluated different ideas, they recognized that a computational project could employ a large office staff and assigned Malcolm Morrow the task of organizing such a group.

The mechanics of starting a new project were fairly simple. Morrow needed to find office space, acquire the necessary furniture, and notify the local WPA office that he could accept a staff of qualified workers. The local office would send him as many people as he needed from those who had applied for relief jobs. The difficult part of Morrow's assignment was the task of finding a sponsor, a scientific organization that would accept the project, oversee the computations, and provide the appropriate mathematical expertise. He started looking for a sponsor at the institution that considered itself to be at the center of American scientific research, the National Academy of Sciences. The academy building stood just a few blocks from the mammoth headquarters of the WPA, so one day in late October, Malcolm Morrow left his desk early and called upon Albert Barrows, the permanent secretary of the National Academy, and asked for assistance.

Morrow began his presentation slowly, stating ideas that were familiar to many of the scientists who worked with the academy. He reported that the statisticians on the WPA staff felt that “there was a very large amount of work, which can be done to improve the mathematical basis on which a great deal of other scientific work depends.” He noted that there were substantial errors “in a number of the standard mathematical tables” and that the “tables already in use ought to be greatly extended,” as more scientists were employing them in their research. Reaching his central point, he told Barrows that the WPA was planning to build a large computing center in New York City. The center would prepare mathematical tables for use “not only by mathematicians and astronomers, but also by surveyors, engineers, chemists, physicists, biometricians, statisticians, etc.” If they were successful, it would be the biggest computing organization in history, a group that might “employ a thousand people, as well as experts to advise.” All of the computers, of course, would be drawn from New York's unemployment rolls, but he assured Barrows that there would be calculating machines and a “training school to initiate employees.” The new center would be an expensive operation, Morrow conceded, but
New York City had $2.3 million available for relief. He implied that a large part of this money “could be devoted to this project.”
⁹

After describing a computing facility nearly as fantastic as Lewis Fry Richardson's weather computing room, Morrow retreated to a more practical realm and admitted that the project would begin on a small scale, perhaps “50 employees under the supervision of technical directors and office managers.” Coming to the key question of the meeting, he asked Barrows if the National Academy of Sciences would be willing to appoint an advisory committee to the computing center, a group that would identify projects for the computers and help prepare computing plans.
¹⁰

In general, the members of the National Academy of Sciences belonged to a class that distrusted Franklin Roosevelt and disliked the idea of government-sponsored work relief. They joked that the initials “WPA” stood for “We Poke Along” and claimed that the public works projects were nothing more than an attempt to buy votes for the Democratic Party. This view of work relief was so pervasive among the secure classes of American society that twenty years after the end of the Great Depression, the novelist Harper Lee could damn a character by claiming, “He was the only man I ever heard of who was fired from the WPA for laziness.”
¹¹
If Barrows held such impressions about work relief or the WPA, he was able to put them aside as he summarized the meeting for academy president Frank Lillie (1870–1947), a University of Chicago zoologist. “Mr. Morrow (a man I should judge of 40 or 45 years of age) impressed me as competent to discuss this project,” he wrote.
¹²

Lillie responded to Morrow's visit by sending a note to the chief statistician of the WPA. “I wish to assure you that we shall be most happy to render any service within our power,” he wrote; “the National Academy of Sciences in its part would be glad to appoint a committee of mathematicians to advise on specific undertakings.”
¹³
Lillie named no names, but he and Barrows had already discussed possible candidates for such a committee, including Oswald Veblen, Vannevar Bush, Harold T. Davis, and James Glover.
¹⁴