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)
“For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection,—for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)