Proving ground, p.7
Proving Ground, page 7
From New York, Adele wrote Grist that she did not expect much because “next week is exam week.”22
But she was able to reach a bright young woman at her own alma mater, Hunter College, whose father, Simon Lichterman, a Russian-born, Bronx Hebrew school teacher, saw the article and told his only daughter, Ruth, about it.
Ruth Lichterman, nineteen, was a quiet, deliberate, beautiful woman who had just completed her sophomore year at Hunter, intending to major in math. She had taken her final exams for the year and was planning to work as a waitress at Camp Copake in Columbia County, New York, an adult summer camp for young Jews from the city.23 But when Simon saw the article, he and Ruth felt the job fit her perfectly, and she began to think she might change her plans.
She applied and was accepted, but the notice had not specified Philadelphia.24 When the Lichtermans found out, they were devastated, not wanting Ruth to live in another city, even though it was only a hundred miles from New York. Still, the pay was too good for Ruth to turn down—$40 a week was more than Simon’s teaching salary. Everyone was trying to “do their part,” and if this was the way she could do it, even if it meant leaving the world she knew, she would try.25 Soon she had moved to Philadelphia, studied with Adele, and taken her seat on the third floor of 3436 Walnut Street, where Marlyn, the Blumberg twins, and the others greeted her with warmth.
Ruth Lichterman was born on February 1, 1924, to Simon Lichterman and Sarah Schreibman. Simon had emigrated from Vilna, Russia, in 1913 at the age of thirteen and was such a good student that he was accepted into the electrical engineering college Cooper Union in Greenwich Village (Cooper Union served as a magnet for bright immigrant children interested in studying engineering or art because tuition was fully paid from an endowment left by Peter Cooper, who designed and built the first US steam locomotive). However, it was the height of World War I, so instead of attending, he enlisted in the Army at age seventeen and was sent to Panama, Britain, and Palestine.26
Ruth’s mother, Sarah, was also born in Russia and had emigrated to the United States using the passport of a male cousin and dressed as a boy. She took a job in a dress factory, and the family eventually saved enough money to pay back the cousin.27
When Simon returned from the Army, he planned to finish Cooper Union and become an electrical engineer. But his brother, Irving, who had also returned from the Army, had obtained a job teaching Hebrew school. Irving was making a good salary, and Simon decided to become a Hebrew school teacher himself. He met Sarah in a political club and fell in love with her instantly, but she had eyes for a different man closer to her age—Simon was seven years younger. The object of Sarah’s affection turned out to be afraid of marriage, but Sarah held out hope. Simon courted Sarah for three years before she finally married him in December 1922.28
Ruth was born fourteen months later. They lived in an apartment in the Bronx, and after Sarah’s sister, Freda, saved enough money to emigrate, she joined the Lichterman household. Ruth shared a bedroom with her; her parents had the other bedroom. The apartment building was across from a school and a park. Children played outdoor games like Ringolevio and stayed out late, which was typical for the time.29 Ruth’s younger brother, Herbert, was born when she was five but died of rheumatic fever five years later. Changed forever by her grief, Sarah became deeply critical of Ruth, bossy and so difficult that Ruth’s friends did not like her.
Before Ruth entered high school, her grandmother died. They moved to a one-bedroom apartment, also in the Bronx. By this time, Freda had married and moved out, and Ruth slept in the living room alone, an improvement. The apartment was across the street from Ruth’s high school, Morris High School, which was at Boston Road and East 166th Street in Melrose, the Bronx. It was the first public high school in the borough.
Ruth was bubbly and talkative, with expressive eyes and an elegant bearing. Boys were always drawn to her. Personable as she was, though, she also had a serious, practical side. She met a boy in Simon’s Torah class, but he was a college student so she decided he was too old for her.
She entered Hunter College in the fall of 1941. The following summer she took a waitressing job at Camp Copake to have fun and save money for tuition. But she turned down the opportunity to go a second summer and moved to Philadelphia, putting college on hold and supporting her family and nation.
Assigned to the Third-Floor Computing Team at 3436 Walnut Street, Ruth worked four desks up from Marlyn. She enjoyed calculating trajectories, which she likened to doing a puzzle. Around this time, the whole team became close. Many days, before the night shift, they met and had dinner together. Ruth and the others often went out on the town to restaurants, bowling alleys, or movie houses. In 1943, the films Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Song of Bernadette (starring Jennifer Jones), Shadow of a Doubt, Edge of Darkness, Mission to Moscow, So Proudly We Hail!, Stormy Weather, Phantom of the Opera, and Lassie Come Home were released. Center City featured the best-known movie theaters in Philadelphia, on Market, Chestnut South, and North 8th Streets, with millions of spectators going to the movies. There was the Boyd Theatre, an art deco palace; the Stanton (with almost 1,500 seats); the Stanley (nearly 3,000 seats); the Aldine; and the Karlton (about 1,000 seats), which featured marble, murals, and gilding.
Mastbaum Theatre at 20th and Market Streets was one of the largest in the country. With almost 5,000 seats, its interior featured marble, murals, gold leaf, tapestries, and chandeliers. There were three lobbies, a Wurlitzer organ, and the largest chandelier in Philadelphia. Frequently closed during the Depression, it had reopened in September 1942 with Tales of Manhattan, and in the war years it offered premieres of Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army, as well as stage shows featuring Eddie Fisher, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Judy Garland.
In those days, movie theaters offered a special “extra.” Films were preceded by Movietone footage showing the news. For a world living with news coming into their homes mostly through the radio, it was thrilling and sometimes disturbing to watch the black-and-white clips, sometimes shot up close to the front lines, which told the story of the war as it unfolded.
The other great advantage of theaters was that they often had air-conditioning. To sit in the dark rooms in front of enormous screens and cool air was a relaxing way to spend a few hours after the noisy, intense work of computing.
Late on some Saturday nights, Florence would circulate song sheets with satirical lyrics she had written to popular songs. “[I’ve Got Spurs] that Jingle, Jangle, Jingle” lyrics became “I’ve got differences that wiggle waggle wiggle / As I go smoothing crazily along / I’ve got factors that make me wanta giggle / As I inverse interpolate along / Oh, Gregory Newton, Oh Gregory Newton / How we love your coefficients—Yes, we love them for computin’ / I’ve got ranges that wiggle waggle wiggle / And my 0s waver crazily along / But if Hitler’s nerves begin to jiggle / Then our tables can’t be very far from wrong.”
“Night and Day” lyrics became “Night and Day, all I can see / Are those marks on that long-winded trajectory… / With its X’s and X Prime / Oh I make mistakes most all of the time / Whether it’s Night or Day!”30
On Sundays, their day off, the women went on picnics, trying to unwind from the workweek. “We didn’t worry about the men in our life because there weren’t any,” Marlyn said. “And we all… let our hair down. We did whatever we felt like doing that we could afford to do.”31
The Monster in the Basement
Like Marlyn and Ruth, Kay and Fran started off calculating ballistics trajectories on desktop calculators with Lila Todd in the early days of the Army computing group when it was still quite small. But their paths quickly diverged from other Computers. Early in their work on the Army computing team, Kay remembers that she and Fran were asked “if we’d be interested in learning how to operate this differential analyzer, which we had never seen.”1 In the basement of the Moore School sat a huge machine. “It was a monster, because it was about thirty feet long and it was all made up of metal shafts and gears that would turn.” Someone told them that the Army expected that this machine could solve a trajectory in less than an hour and greatly reduce the time needed to generate a firing table. Kay was a little skeptical because “it was very, very complicated looking.”2
It was called a differential analyzer, the brainchild of Vannevar Bush, a famous scientist from MIT who had created an “analog computer,” one that solved sophisticated equations and even some types of differential calculus equations with a huge “collection of shafts, gears, and wires.”3 They were very expensive, and everyone wanted one. In the mid-1930s, when the Moore School was ready to buy, the price tag of $100,000 ($1.5 million today) was too high. So the Moore School approached the BRL to help sponsor the machine. BRL did so with one particular provision: “in case of a national emergency Aberdeen [Proving Ground] would take over the machine.”4
The analyzer served as a research machine for Professor Cornelius Weygandt and his students until the United States entered WWII. In June 1942, a team from BRL, which also had its own, albeit smaller, analyzer, came to Penn to run the one in the basement of the Moore School.5 The huge machine was simply too big to move, and the contract gave the Army control of not only the machine but also the room itself. BRL posted a sign on the door that read RESTRICTED. From now on, the analyzer would be used only for BRL purposes. Academic research would have to wait.
To the surprise of the Moore School, which did not have any women working on the analyzer, BRL quickly assigned Computers to run it. Kay and Fran were part of this early team, and on the day they were assigned, they disappeared into the basement to begin their next assignment.6
In the former boiler room, they saw something astounding. The analyzer resembled “a giant’s mattress spring,” according to Professor Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT, who used one as a student.7 It was over thirty feet and consisted of long metal rods with strings, bands, plates, gears, shafts, and rods. To solve just one ballistics trajectory, Weygandt and his crew had set up dozens of motors, thousands of relays, 2,000 vacuum tubes, and 200 miles of wire.
The analyzer was supposed to be the answer to BRL’s need for faster calculation, and indeed when the analyzer was working, it could run a trajectory in less than an hour, far faster than the Computers working on the desktop calculators. To do it, one Computer input data into the equation using a long, flat board. Another Computer watched over the middle of the analyzer, where gears performed multiplication by two when a thirty-tooth gear meshed into a sixty-tooth gear.8
Initially, Kay and Fran started on the same shift and it was a joy to be together, as always. They studied under the BRL team, but soon they were separated, as BRL staff, looking to return home, assigned the two young women to be supervisors of the two alternating analyzer shifts: day and night. One would work two weeks as supervisor of the day shift, then two weeks on nights; the other worked two weeks on nights and then two weeks on days. They would miss working together.
Unlike the Computers on the Third-Floor Computing Team at 3436 Walnut Street, where one Computer calculated a single trajectory from start to finish on her desktop calculator, the analyzer teams shared the same equation because it was literally built onto the huge analog machine. Kay’s shift would hand off their calculations, and partial results, to Fran’s shift, and vice versa. Fortunately, after years of friendship and professional collaboration, the two women could practically read each other’s minds. They were the perfect set of supervisors to work together to keep the analyzer calculations on track, sixteen hours a day, six days a week.
Kay, as supervisor, often sat at the opposite end of the analyzer watching as the ten round counters turned to show the results of the analyzer’s calculation. When they stopped, she wrote down the results.9
But Kay had very little confidence in this expensive and prestigious device and found that “there were millions of things that could go wrong with the machine.” To check the analyzer’s accuracy, she kept an old and reliable desktop calculator on a table in the back of the room and regularly ran “hand-calculated trajectories just to check on it and make sure that we’re not too far off” and check that the analyzer was doing what it should.10
When the result was too far off, she called in the maintenance team because the Moore School staff was supposed to fix it. It was their job to build each equation onto the analyzer and then check bands, shafts, gears, and motors to see that everything was running well. A loose band, slipped gear, or broken wire meant that the analyzer’s accuracy went down and the trajectory results were less useful. Joe Chapline, who came from Ursinus with John Mauchly to help with wartime projects, had signed on as a maintenance engineer, or as he called it, “the nurse who cared for the operation of the big mechanical computer.”11 Other Moore School students and recent graduates came in and out to help.
The Computers were not supposed to fix the hardware, but late at night when a problem popped up and no maintenance engineers were in the building, Kay sometimes fixed things herself, as she did not want the team to lose valuable calculating time. When the bands were out around the motors, Kay put them back on. When the strings broke, she replaced them with the fishing wire used for the analyzer, a brand called “cutty sark.” Years later she shared that whenever she saw a bottle of Scotch whisky called Cutty Sark, she remembered her days working with the analyzer.12
But replacing wire under tension was a dangerous task, as were several other aspects of running the analyzer. One treacherous day, when a Computer had her nail ripped out by the analyzer, John Holberton carried her to the hospital himself for treatment.13
Despite the sign on the door that read RESTRICTED and indicated that only people with military clearance for the analyzer room should enter, many people found their way into the room. For the analyzer room was air-conditioned, an expensive luxury that was installed—not for the staff, but for the hardware. Its gears, bands, wires, and plates could operate only in a narrow range of temperatures and humidity.
Kay was surprised at how many members of the Moore School violated the military restrictions just to enjoy the cool air. “All the professors at Moore School, plus any graduate students or anybody that possibly found some reason to come to the analyzer room” came down to the remote basement room for their “gab fests,” she recalled.14
But it wasn’t enough. Even with the desktop computing teams and the analyzer computing teams working hard, Herman still could not generate the number of trajectories he needed for the firing tables the Army needed.
By early 1943, he was tearing his hair out.
One day in March 1943, watching Herman standing over the great, analog electromechanical machine in utter frustration, Joe Chapline quietly approached him.
“You ought to talk to a guy upstairs named Mauchly,” Joe said. “He has some ideas about how to do it electronically.”
“Can I meet him?” Herman asked.
“Sure, come on,” Joe said.15
Together they went upstairs to meet Joe’s friend Dr. John Mauchly. And history was about to be made.
The Lost Memo
Once they met, Herman and John realized they had much in common. Both were teachers, displaced by the war from faculty jobs they treasured, Herman at the University of Michigan and John at Ursinus College. They were both married to mathematicians who had jumped in to help and even run parts of their military projects.
And both were enormously frustrated. Herman because he was under such pressure to produce firing tables and no amount of recruiting, training, desktop calculators, or even use of the differential analyzer seemed to make much of a difference in the backlog. John because, despite his heavy teaching load and helping run the Army radar project, he felt unacknowledged by his peers. He was never accorded the title of “professor,” only “instructor” at the Moore School, despite being a well-respected professor at Ursinus and chairman of its physics department.
Plus, John had a vision for an all-electronic programmable computer and was finding it hard to get Moore School faculty to talk with him about it. The computer he envisioned would work at lightning-fast speeds, the speed of electrons, not the turtle’s pace of electromechanical switches. It would be digital, not analog, and general purpose, meaning it could solve a wide array of equations and problems.
Herman was intrigued by John’s idea about a new computer. The two discussed how this computer might solve ballistics trajectories in minutes, not days, as the hand calculations with desktop calculators could, or hours, as trajectories on a well-working analyzer could.
As John conceived of it, twenty to thirty specially built electronic devices “would be able to perform 1,000 multiplications per second, and to perform complete trajectories in a minute or two.”1 John hoped to use this power for his favorite problem: weather forecasting. He wanted to use computers to calculate the path of storms and provide early warning for communities in the path of big storms (a complex problem calculated by supercomputers today). But his computer would work just as well for ballistics trajectory calculations.
Herman recognized a solution, albeit a far-flung one, when he saw it.
John warned that the price tag for the experimental new equipment would be high, but Herman was not deterred. He knew in the midst of the war, money was not a barrier when important problems were involved.2 John was delighted that Herman was interested in his vision and dream. Herman’s next question flowed easily. Could John write up the idea?
John responded, “I already have.”3
Seven months earlier, others at the Moore School had asked the same question, and John put time and thought into writing a clear, succinct five-page paper called “The Use of High-Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating.”4 He then went to a secretary to have it specially prepared, typing on mechanical typewriters being a special skill of the day.
