Wartime Computing and The Invention of Electronic Computing
Human computers have 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 Manhattan Project, human computers, working with a variety of mechanical aids, assisted numerical studies of the complex formulas related to nuclear fission. Because the six people responsible for setting up problems on the ENIAC (the premiere general-purpose electronic digital computer built at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II) were drafted from a corps of human computers, the world's first professional computer programmers were women, paving the way for careers in data processing as socially acceptable for women in an era of gender roles. These six computers-turned-computer-programmers were Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas.
Following World War II, the 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, reduce it to standard engineering units.
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Famous quotes containing the words wartime, invention and/or electronic:
“The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)