Kathleen Antonelli - Career As A Computer Programmer

Career As A Computer Programmer

A week or two after graduating, she happened to see a U.S. Civil Service ad in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Under the headline "Wanted: Women With Degrees in Mathematics," it read, "The need for women engineers and scientists is growing both in industry and government... Women are being offered scientific and engineering jobs where formerly men were preferred. Now is the time to consider your job in science and engineering... you will find that the slogan there as elsewhere is 'WOMEN WANTED!'." The Army was looking for women with mathematics degrees—right there in Philadelphia. She immediately called her two co-math majors, Frances Bilas and Josephine Benson. The latter couldn't meet up with them, so Kathleen and Fran met in Philadelphia one morning in June 1942 for an interview in a building on South Broad Street (likely the Union League Building), where they were informed of positions available through Aberdeen Proving Grounds at the University of Pennsylvania. Shortly thereafter, the two both received letters telling them to report for a week at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 33rd and Walnut Streets, beginning a day in early July 1942. At a starting annual salary of $1,620, pay for the position computing ballistics trajectories used for artillery firing tables (mostly using mechanical desk calculators and extremely large sheets of columned paper) was low (S.P. 4, a "sub-professional" pay grade), but both Kathleen and Fran were satisfied to have attained employment that utilized their educations, during wartime, having had no prior employment experience, and that served the war effort. Her official civil service title, as printed on her employment documentation, was "computer." With about 10 other "girls" (as the female computers were called) and 4 men—a group recently brought to the Moore School from Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland--Kay and Fran would conduct their work in a large, empty classroom on the first floor of the Moore School; the same room would later be the one where the ENIAC was built and operated until December 1946.

Despite all their coursework, their mathematics training had not prepared Kay (as she came to be called early on at the Moore School) and Fran for their work calculating trajectories for firing tables: they were both unfamiliar with numerical integration methods used to compute the trajectories, and the textbook lent to them to study from (Numerical Mathematical Analysis, 1st Edition by James B. Scarborough, Oxford University Press, 1930) provided little enlightenment. The two newcomers ultimately learned how to perform the steps of their calculations, accurate to ten decimal places, through practice and the advisement of a well-liked supervisor, Lila Todd. A total of about 75 young female computers were employed at the Moore School in this period, many of them taking courses from Adele Goldstine, Mary Mauchly, and Mildred Kramer. The work was tedious, and many of them dropped out due to workload, but Kay became prominent among the computing women.

After 2 or 3 months, Kay and Fran were moved to work on the differential analyzer in the basement of the Moore School, the largest and most sophisticated analog mechanical calculator of the time, of which there were only 3 in the United States and 5 or 6 in the world (all of the others were in Great Britain). Using the analyzer (invented by Vannevar Bush of MIT a decade prior and made more precise with improvements by the Moore School staff), a single trajectory computation—about 40 hours of work on a mechanical desk calculator—could be performed in about 50 minutes.