Herman Goldstine - BRL and The Moore School

BRL and The Moore School

As a result of the United States' entering World War II, Goldstine left the University of Michigan where he was a professor in July, 1942 to enlist in the Army. He was commissioned a lieutenant and worked as an ordnance mathematician calculating firing tables at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. The firing tables were used in battle to find the appropriate elevation and azimuth for aiming artillery, which had a range of several miles.

The firing table calculations were accomplished by about one hundred women operating mechanical desk calculators. Each combination of gun, round and geographical region required a unique set of firing tables. It took about 750 calculations to compute a single trajectory and each table had about 3,000 trajectories. It took one of these people—known, ironically, as computers—about 12 days to compute one trajectory, and more than four years to compute a table. To increase production, BRL enlisted the computing facilities of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Goldstine was the liaison between BRL and the university.