When Computers Were Human (54 page)

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 equipment for the solution of algebraic equations,” and finally “two general purpose automatic electronic digital computing machines of large capacity.”
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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.”
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Arnold Lowan immediately protested the decision and claimed that it would cause “complete demoralization of our personnel.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 group 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.”
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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.
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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.
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In the history of human computers, this is the one moment that might have provoked a labor action, a strike by those who worked with numbers, but the computers were unwilling to back Arnold Lowan. The United Public Workers made one final attempt to start a protest by charging
that Curtiss's plan “would certainly lead to the Bureau's having two relatively inefficient computing groups,” but they found that there was no support for their position among either the computers or the scientists.
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By midsummer, they had abandoned their efforts on behalf of the Mathematical Tables Project. That July, the new Computation Laboratory opened its doors in downtown Washington, and simultaneously, Arnold Lowan changed the name of his office to “Computation Laboratory, New York.”

During the ten-year history of the Mathematical Tables Project, John von Neumann was a distant figure whose letters offered nothing but vague encouragement and deferred hope. He never visited the project offices, though he made time to visit the Admiralty Computing Service in England, and he never offered an unconditional blessing to Arnold Lowan. Only in the final days of the Mathematical Tables Project, just as his letter was sealing the project's fate, did von Neuman ask Arnold Lowan for computational assistance. He asked whether the computers would test a new technique called “linear programming.” Von Neumann was not really interested in the results of the test computation, just as he was not especially interested in the future of the Mathematical Tables Project. He requested the calculation because he wanted to use the human computers as surrogates for computing machines, as a means of projecting the operation of a programmable electronic computer.

John von Neumann may have initiated the request, but he did not invent the method of linear programming. The technique was developed by a student of Jerzy Neyman named George Dantzig (1914–). Dantzig had spent much of the war analyzing operational problems for the Army Air Corps. A typical problem looked for the best way of storing spare parts for aircraft. The idea was to find the number of storehouses that would provide the best access to parts yet at the same time minimize the expense of keeping a large inventory.
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Such problems had posed serious difficulties for the air corps, according to one of Dantzig's contemporaries, and had “required the labors of hundreds of highly trained staff officers.”
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Dantzig had been able to test his method of linear programming only on small, simple problems, as the work had the same kind of demands as least squares or simultaneous equations. A small problem, such as the task of locating two or three storehouses, was simple and straightforward. As problems grew, the amount of calculation expanded rapidly. If the problem was doubled to six storehouses, then the calculations would require eight times the effort. Dantzig would have been restricted to these simple problems had he not been given the opportunity to present his method to von Neumann. He visited von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study and encountered an impatient mathematician. “In under
one minute, I slapped the geometric and the algebraic version of the problem on the [black]board,” he recalled. Von Neumann quickly grasped the nature of the problem, took the chalk, and “then proceeded for the next hour and a half to lecture me on the mathematical theory of linear programs.”
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As it happened, Dantzig's work was related to research that von Neumann had already completed. Von Neumann wanted to see Dantzig's method tested on a large problem, one that had a classic standing in the economics literature. This problem attempted to identify the cheapest possible diet from among seventy-seven different foods. The list of foods began with wheat flour and ended with strawberry preserves. The diet had to provide 3,000 calories and minimum amounts of eight different nutrients.
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The calculations for this problem included 29,856 additions, 15,315 multiplications, and 1,243 divisions.
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Von Neumann had hoped that the Aberdeen Proving Ground might agree to do this calculation on the ENIAC, but the ballistics researchers refused the request, so he turned to Arnold Lowan and the Mathematical Tables Project.
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