Person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became available
For the Indian writer and mental calculator known as the human computer, see Shakuntala Devi. For other mental calculators, see Mental calculator.
NACA High Speed Flight Station "Computer Room" (1949)
The term "computer", in use from the early 17th century (the first known written reference dates from 1613),[1] meant "one who computes": a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available. Alan Turing described the "human computer" as someone who is "supposed to be following fixed rules; he has no authority to deviate from them in any detail."[2] Teams of people, often women from the late nineteenth century onwards, were used to undertake long and often tedious calculations; the work was divided so that this could be done in parallel. The same calculations were frequently performed independently by separate teams to check the correctness of the results.
Since the end of the 20th century, the term "human computer" has also been applied to individuals with prodigious powers of mental arithmetic, also known as mental calculators.
Origins in sciences
Astronomers in Renaissance times used that term about as often as they called themselves "mathematicians" for their principal work of calculating the positions of planets. They often hired a "computer" to assist them. For some men, such as Johannes Kepler, assisting a scientist in computation was a temporary position until they moved on to greater advancements.
Computing became more organized when the Frenchman Alexis Claude Clairaut (1713–1765) divided the computation to determine the time of the return of Halley's Comet with two colleagues, Joseph Lalande and Nicole-Reine Lepaute.[3] Human computers continued plotting the future movements of astronomical objects to create celestial tables for almanacs in the late 1760s.[4]
The computers working on the Nautical Almanac for the British Admiralty included William Wales, Israel Lyons and Richard Dunthorne.[5] The project was overseen by Nevil Maskelyne.[6] Maskelyne would borrow tables from other sources as often as he could in order to reduce the number of calculations his team of computers had to make.[7]
Women were generally excluded, with some exceptions such as Mary Edwards who worked from the 1780s to 1815 as one of thirty-five computers for the British Nautical Almanac used for navigation at sea. The United States also worked on their own version of a nautical almanac in the 1840s, with Maria Mitchell being one of the best-known computers on the staff.[8]
Other innovations in human computing included the work done by a group of boys who worked in the Octagon Room of the Royal Greenwich Observatory for Astronomer Royal, George Airy.[9] Airy's computers, hired after 1835, could be as young as fifteen and they were working on a backlog of astronomical data.[10] The way that Airy organized the Octagon Room with a manager, pre-printed computing forms and standardized methods of calculating and checking results (similar to the way the Nautical Almanac computers operated) would remain a standard for computing operations for the next 80 years.[11]
Women were increasingly involved in computing after 1865.[12] Private companies hired them for computing and to manage office staffs.[12]
In the 1870s, the United States Signal Corps created a new way of organizing human computing to track weather patterns.[13] This built on previous work from the US Navy and the Smithsonian meteorological project.[14] The Signal Corps used a small computing staff that processed data that had to be collected quickly and finished in "intensive two-hour shifts".[15] Each individual human computer was responsible for only part of the data.[13]
In the late nineteenth century Edward Charles Pickering organized the "Harvard Computers".[16] The first woman to approach them, Anna Winlock, asked Harvard Observatory for a computing job in 1875.[17] By 1880, all of the computers working at the Harvard Observatory were women.[17] The standard computer pay started at twenty-five cents an hour.[18] There would be such a huge demand to work there, that some women offered to work for the Harvard Computers for free.[19] Many of the women astronomers from this era were computers with possibly the best-known being Florence Cushman, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Annie Jump Cannon, who worked with Pickering from 1888, 1893, and 1896 respectively. Cannon could classify stars at a rate of three per minute.[20]Mina Fleming, one of the Harvard Computers, published The Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra in 1890.[21] The catalogue organized stars by spectral lines.[21] The catalogue continued to be expanded by the Harvard Computers and added new stars in successive volumes.[22]Elizabeth Williams was involved in calculations in the search for a new planet, Pluto, at the Lowell Observatory.
In 1893, Francis Galton created the Committee for Conducting Statistical Inquiries into the Measurable Characteristics of Plants and Animals which reported to the Royal Society.[23] The committee used advanced techniques for scientific research and supported the work of several scientists.[23]W.F. Raphael Weldon, the first scientist supported by the committee worked with his wife, Florence Tebb Weldon, who was his computer.[23] Weldon used logarithms and mathematical tables created by August Leopold Crelle and had no calculating machine.[24]Karl Pearson, who had a lab at the University of London, felt that the work Weldon did was "hampered by the committee".[25] However, Pearson did create a mathematical formula that the committee was able to use for data correlation.[26] Pearson brought his correlation formula to his own Biometrics Laboratory.[26] Pearson had volunteer and salaried computers who were both men and women.[27]Alice Lee was one of his salaried computers who worked with histograms and the chi-squared statistics.[28] Pearson also worked with Beatrice and Frances Cave-Brown-Cave.[28] Pearson's lab, by 1906, had mastered the art of mathematical table making.[28]
Mathematical tables
Human computers were used to compile 18th and 19th century Western European mathematical tables, for example those for trigonometry and logarithms. Although these tables were most often known by the names of the principal mathematician involved in the project, such tables were often in fact the work of an army of unknown and unsung computers. Ever more accurate tables to a high degree of precision were needed for navigation and engineering. Approaches differed, but one was to break up the project into a form of long distance work from home piece work. The computers, often educated middle class women who society deemed it unseemly to engage in the professions or go out to work, would receive and send back packets of calculations by post.[29] The Royal Astronomical Society eventually gave space to a new committee, the Mathematical Tables Committee, which was the only professional organization for human computers in 1925.[30]
A visionary application to meteorology can be found in the scientific work of Lewis Fry Richardson who, in 1922, estimated that 64,000 humans could forecast the weather for the whole globe by solving the attending differential primitive equations numerically.[32] Around 1910 he had already used human computers to calculate the stresses inside a masonry dam.[33]
NACA human computers – Supersonic Pressure Tunnel staff in 1950s1954, NACA computer working with microscope and calculator
Wartime computing and electronics
It was not until World War I that computing became a profession. "The First World War required large numbers of human computers. Computers on both sides of the war produced map grids, surveying aids, navigation tables and artillery tables. With the men at war, most of these new computers were women and many were college educated."[34] This would happen again during World War II, as more men joined the fight, college educated women were left to fill their positions. One of the first female computers, Elizabeth Webb Wilson, was hired by the Army in 1918 and was a graduate of George Washington University. Wilson "patiently sought a war job that would make use of her mathematical skill. In later years, she would claim that the war spared her from the 'Washington social whirl', the rounds of society events that should have procured for her a husband"[34] and instead she was able to have a career. After the war, Wilson continued with a career in mathematics and became an actuary and turned her focus to life tables.
Human computers played integral roles in the World War II war effort in the United States, and because of the depletion of the male labor force due to the draft, many computers during World War II were women, frequently with degrees in mathematics. In the 1940s, women were hired to examine nuclear and particle tracks left on photographic emulsions.[35] In the Manhattan Project, human computers working with a variety of mechanical aids assisted numerical studies of the complex formulas related to nuclear fission.[36]
Human computers were involved in calculating ballistics tables during World War I.[37] Between the two world wars, computers were used in the Department of Agriculture in the United States and also at Iowa State College.[38] The human computers in these places also used calculating machines and early electrical computers to aid in their work.[39] In the 1930s, The Columbia University Statistical Bureau was created by Benjamin Wood.[40] Organized computing was also established at Indiana University, the Cowles Commission and the National Research Council.[41]
Following World War II, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) used human computers in flight research to transcribe raw data from celluloid film and oscillograph paper and then, using slide rules and electric calculators, reduced the data to standard engineering units. Margot Lee Shetterly's biographical book, Hidden Figures (made into a movie of the same name in 2016), depicts African American women who served as human computers at NASA in support of the Friendship 7, the first American manned mission into Earth orbit.[42] NACA had begun hiring black women as computers from 1940.[43] One such computer was Dorothy Vaughan who began her work in 1943 with the Langley Research Center as a special hire to aid the war effort,[44] and who came to supervise the West Area Computers, a group of African-American women who worked as computers at Langley. Human computing was, at the time, considered menial work. On November 8, 2019, the Congressional Gold Medal was awarded "In recognition of all the women who served as computers, mathematicians, and engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) between the 1930s and the 1970s."[45]
The term "human computer" has been recently used by a group of researchers who refer to their work as "human computation".[48] In this usage, "human computer" refers to activities of humans in the context of human-based computation (HBC).
This use of "human computer" is debatable for the following reason: HBC is a computational technique where a machine outsources certain parts of a task to humans to perform, which are not necessarily algorithmic. In fact, in the context of HBC most of the time humans are not provided with a sequence of exact steps to be executed to yield the desired result; HBC is agnostic about how humans solve the problem. This is why "outsourcing" is the term used in the definition above. The use of humans in the historical role of "human computers" for HBC is very rare.
↑ "computer". Oxford English Dictionary (Thirded.). Oxford University Press. March 2008. 1613 'R. B.' Yong Mans Gleanings 1, I have read the truest computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that ever breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number.
1 2 Grier, David Alan (March 1, 2001). "Human Computers: The First Pioneers of the Information Age". Endeavour. 25 (1): 28–32. doi:10.1016/S0160-9327(00)01338-7.
A difference engine, a calculating machine designed in the 1820s, was first created by Charles Babbage. Difference engines are automatic mechanical calculators designed to tabulate polynomial functions. The name, the difference engine, is derived from the method of divided differences, a way to interpolate or tabulate functions by using a small set of polynomial co-efficients. Some of the most common mathematical functions used in engineering, science and navigation, were, and still are able to be computed with the use of the difference engine's capability of computing logarithmic and trigonometric functions, which can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful tables of numbers.
ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. It was Turing-complete, and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.
Mathematical tables are lists of numbers showing the results of a calculation with varying arguments. Tables of trigonometric functions were used in ancient Greece and India for applications to astronomy and celestial navigation. They continued to be widely used until electronic calculators became cheap and plentiful, in order to simplify and drastically speed up computation. Tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions were common in math and science textbooks, and specialized tables were published for numerous applications.
Baron Gaspard Clair François Marie Riche de Prony was a French mathematician and engineer, who worked on hydraulics. He was born at Chamelet, Beaujolais, France and died in Asnières-sur-Seine, France.
The history of computing is longer than the history of computing hardware and modern computing technology and includes the history of methods intended for pen and paper or for chalk and slate, with or without the aid of tables.
Gertrude Blanch was an American mathematician who did pioneering work in numerical analysis and computation. She was a leader of the Mathematical Tables Project in New York from its beginning. She worked later as the assistant director and leader of the Numerical Analysis at UCLA computing division and was head of mathematical research for the Aerospace Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
The Mathematical Tables Project was one of the largest and most sophisticated computing organizations that operated prior to the invention of the digital electronic computer. Begun in the United States in 1938 as a project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), it employed 450 unemployed clerks to tabulate higher mathematical functions, such as exponential functions, logarithms, and trigonometric functions. These tables were eventually published in a 28 volume set by Columbia University Press.
Wallace John Eckert was an American astronomer, who directed the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau at Columbia University which evolved into the research division of IBM.
Leslie John Comrie FRS was an astronomer and a pioneer in mechanical computation.
Douglas Rayner Hartree was an English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree–Fock equations of atomic physics and the construction of a differential analyser using Meccano.
Women in computing were among the first programmers in the early 20th century, and contributed substantially to the industry. As technology and practices altered, the role of women as programmers has changed, and the recorded history of the field has downplayed their achievements.
The history of computer science began long before our modern discipline of computer science, usually appearing in forms like mathematics or physics. Developments in previous centuries alluded to the discipline that we now know as computer science. This progression, from mechanical inventions and mathematical theories towards modern computer concepts and machines, led to the development of a major academic field, massive technological advancement across the Western world, and the basis of a massive worldwide trade and culture.
Adele Goldstine was an American mathematician and computer programmer. She wrote the manual for the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC. Through her work programming the computer, she was also an instrumental player in converting the ENIAC from a computer that needed to be reprogrammed each time it was used to one that was able to perform a set of fifty stored instructions.
Kathleen "Kay" McNulty Mauchly Antonelli was an Irish-American computer programmer and one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose electronic digital computers.
Leland Erskin Cunningham was an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets. In a career spanning 50 years, he became an authority on orbit theory and on precise measurements of the orbits of comets, planets, satellites, and space probes. He was also an early authority on electronic digital computers and assisted in their construction and use in orbit calculations.
Anna Winlock (1857–1904) was an American astronomer and human computer, one of the first members of female computer group known as "the Harvard Computers." She made the most complete catalog of stars near the north and south poles of her era. She is also remembered for her calculations and studies of asteroids. In particular, she did calculations on 433 Eros and 475 Ocllo.
Beatrice Mabel Cave-Browne-Cave, MBE AFRAeS was an English mathematician who undertook pioneering work in the mathematics of aeronautics.
Alice Lee (1858–1939) was a British mathematician, one of the first women to graduate from London University. She was awarded a PhD in 1901. She worked with Karl Pearson from 1892. She demonstrated that the correlation between cranial capacity and gender was not a sign of greater intelligence in men compared to women.
This is a timeline of women in computing. It covers the time when women worked as "human computers" and then as programmers of physical computers. Eventually, women programmers went on to write software, develop Internet technologies and other types of programming. Women have also been involved in computer science, various related types of engineering and computer hardware.
Dorothy Johnson Vaughan was an African American mathematician and human computer who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and NASA, at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. In 1949, she became acting supervisor of the West Area Computers, the first African-American woman to receive a promotion and supervise a group of staff at the center.
Hunt, J. C. R. (1998). "Lewis Fry Richardson and His Contribution to Mathematics, Meteorology and Models of Conflict". Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. 30 (1): xiii–xxxvi. Bibcode:1998AnRFM..30D..13H. doi:10.1146/annurev.fluid.30.1.0.
Kean, Sam (2010). The Disappearing Spoon – and other true tales from the Periodic Table. London: Black Swan. p.108. ISBN978-0-552-77750-6.
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