When Computers Were Human (18 page)

16. Exhibit hall of the World's Columbian Exposition

Taken by themselves, these commercial statistics offered little to human computers, as they were not considered to be part of scientific calculation. When placed in the larger context of the fair, the presence of social statistics suggested that many individuals and organizations were attempting to bring the precision of scientific calculation to the phenomena of social, economic, and personal life. The use of statistics was clearly seen at the intellectual part of the exposition, a series of meetings called the World's Congress Auxiliary. The Congresses, as they were called, were held at the newly finished Art Institute building in center-city Chicago rather than at the fairgrounds. In contrast to the fair directors, who were most interested in material products and inventions, the Congress organizers took as their motto “Not things but men; not matter but mind.” Between May and October, there were 1,200 separate meetings that covered almost every aspect of human endeavor. Some of these congresses were conferences of existing professional organizations, while the rest were special events that covered topics such as women's rights, religion, art, philosophy, engineering, history, literature, and science.
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The Congress most directly related to computation, the meeting on mathematics and astronomy, revealed signs of a split between the two disciplines, the decline of an old alliance that had nurtured human computers. Representatives of the astronomers and the mathematicians had agreed to hold a single meeting, but there was no Benjamin Peirce, no central figure to pull the groups together. The mathematicians, desirous of showing their independence and sophistication, were discussing the theorems and proofs of German mathematics. It was a time when German scholarship, particularly German scientific research, “became the focus of extravagant excitement and admiration.”
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German mathematicians emphasized abstraction, generality, rigor, and formal proofs. Of the forty-six mathematical speakers at the Congress, half came from Germany. Congress organizers were so interested in German methods that they arranged for a special train to take them to the fairgrounds so that they might study a display prepared by the German universities of Göttingen, Bonn, and Berlin.
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At the Mathematics and Astronomy Congress, the established computing offices could offer nothing that could compare to the German speakers. The first American to address the group was the librarian of the Coast and Geodetic Survey Office, Artemas Martin (1835–1918). Martin was the kind of mathematician that had once been common in the United States. He had been raised on a farm in western Pennsylvania and had
taught himself the basic elements of mathematical practice. While selling produce at a local market, he would fill the margins of his account books with mathematical problems and their solutions.
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Though he was well known for his “rare and happy faculty of presenting his solutions in the simplest mathematical language,” his contributions seemed overwhelmed by those of the German contributors.
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The astronomy talks were also divided between the old and the new. The senior astronomers were more interested in the new methods of astrophysics than in the classical calculations of positional astronomy. Edward Pickering, whose computing floor at Harvard remained one of the largest astronomical computing groups, talked about his analysis of the light reflected from the moon, an analysis that identified the chemical composition of the lunar surface. The discussion of calculation was left to the junior astronomers: a French computer, Dorothea Klumpke, from the Paris Observatory; Maria Mitchell's replacement at the Nautical Almanac Office, David Todd; and Harvard computer Wilhemina Fleming.
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The Congress on Electrical Engineering, which was held the same week as the Mathematics and Astronomy Congress, suggested that organized computing was starting to move into the commercial and manufacturing applications of science. An employee of the new General Electric Company, the engineer Charles Steinmetz (1865–1923), gave a talk on the mathematical model of alternating current. Near the end of his presentation, he described his company's computing division. For those familiar with the computing offices of observatories and almanacs, the name was misleading, for the division had no large staff of human computers. The computing division consisted of a small staff of engineers who reviewed the designs of electrical circuits, motors, controllers, and other devices. Using the techniques that were being developed by Steinmetz and others, these engineers verified that the electrical devices would behave as they were intended to behave. This work required a lot of calculation, but for the moment, all of the arithmetic was handled by the engineers themselves. A decade would pass before they would divide the work with a staff of human computers.
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The Congress on History provided a starting point for the use of numbers in the social sciences and the need to process large amounts of statistical data. The congress included a paper by University of Wisconsin professor Frederick Jackson Turner, who began his talk by referring to the reports of the 1890 census. Using numbers that had been tabulated by Herman Hollerith's machines, the reports stated that the United States no longer had a large area that could be considered an unpopulated frontier. “This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement,” observed Turner to his audience. “Up to our own day, American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the
Great West.”
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Turner's conclusion may have surprised his audience, but it built upon a traditional relationship between statistics and the discipline of history. Through the end of the nineteenth century, the study of statistics was related more closely to historical research than to mathematical study. The term “statistics” was taken to mean the numbers of the state, the numbers that described the strength, wealth, and health of a country.
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Most of the early American statisticians were either physicians or historians. The physicians were using numbers to measure problems of public health, while the historians were interested in social stability.
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The Statistical Congress at the fair spent little time on mathematical issues and debated how numbers could be better used for governance and management.
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By 1893, statistical methods had begun to spread to other fields of research, notably economics, agricultural research, and the field that would ultimately be named “Sociology.” The Congress on Social Progress caught the first discussions of this new discipline. One of the key speakers, the Chicago social worker Jane Addams (1860–1935), based her ideas on the practical needs of the city dwellers, but she reached for a deeper understanding of society that could only come through numbers. She not only spoke of individual cases that appeared at Hull House, the institution that she had founded, but also tried to give a fuller picture of social needs in the city of Chicago. Her ideas were echoed in other discussions that touched upon social issues, notably the Congress on Women's Progress and the Congress on Labor.
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Henry Adams, who spoke at the History Congress, clearly saw the rising importance of statistics and numbers in the study of social life but was uncomfortable with such tools. “At best [I] could never have been a mathematician,” he wrote, “but [I] needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language, and [I] never reached the alphabet.”
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Numbers tended to suggest a scientific certainty, fundamental laws, ultimate goals. To him the fair and congresses suggested that Americans seemed to be “driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said to be drifting towards some point in space,”
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but he could not identify that point. Within the field of computation, it is hard to find a single idea at the fair that summarized the position of human computers in 1893. One can find the influence of the traditional computational fields: astronomy, calculus, surveying, and navigation. Equally prevalent were the new ideas of German mathematics, social science, mathematical statistics, and computing machinery. Tying these themes together were the familiar strands of mass production and the division of labor. By 1893, most observers could see that the industrial economy had both benefits and drawbacks. Companies rewarded their workers unequally. Factory methods eliminated some of the skills that workers had
passed from generation to generation. The industrial economy had only a few places for women, even though colleges were educating women in record numbers. Industrial leaders, including scientists, could develop products and ideas that were not always beneficial to society as a whole. The innovations in scientific calculation that came with mass-produced calculating machines were not as easy or as obvious as the lessons in divided labor. If they were headed toward a single point in space, that point encouraged the expansion of scientific methodology to problems beyond astronomy, the demand to use resources efficiently in research, and the requirement to have accurate results.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Darwin's Cousins

I
N
1894, when the playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) needed to invent a character that captured the challenges faced by the young women of his age, he made her a mathematician. Vivian Warren, the central character of the play
Mrs. Warren's Profession
, is a graduate of Newnham College, a women's school at Cambridge. Such colleges were still new in the 1890s and were trying to find their way amidst the older and wealthier men's schools. One measure of success for the women's schools was the scores of their students on the Tripos, the Cambridge mathematical honors exam. In 1890, a Newnham student had drawn national attention by besting all of her male peers and achieving the top score on the Tripos, an achievement that would have made her First Wrangler but for her gender.
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In
Mrs. Warren's Profession
, Shaw has the fictional Vivian Warren achieve the third-highest score on the exam, a detail that was probably added in consideration of Shaw's friend, the mathematician Karl Pearson (1857–1936). When Pearson was a student at Cambridge, he had been the Third Wrangler in the Tripos.
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As a friendly jab at Pearson, who was somewhat sensitive about the fact that he did not get the top score on the exam, Shaw has Warren confess that she took the Tripos exam only because her mother agreed to pay her fifty pounds “to try for fourth wrangler or thereabouts.” Even though she bested her goal, Warren concludes that the Tripos “doesn't pay. I wouldn't do it again for the same money.”
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In
Mrs. Warren's Profession
, Vivian Warren is identified as an actuary, but she does the work of a human computer. She describes her work as “calculations for engineers, electricians, insurance companies, and so on.” In one speech, she talks about how much she enjoys working in an actuarial office in the city of London. Her days are spent in calculations. “In the evenings we smoked and talked, and never dreamt of going out except for exercise. And I never enjoyed myself more in my life.”
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The play opens with the trappings of a domestic comedy: a young woman, a young man, a country house, a wise friend, and a mother, the
Mrs. Warren of the title. As the plot unfolds, we learn that Mrs. Warren is not simply a wealthy landowner but also a former prostitute and the manager of a brothel. As Vivian Warren learns her mother's story, she systematically rejects the other characters of the play and retreats into mathematics, as if it is the only thing that is pure and untainted. Her suitor is the easiest thing to reject, as he proves to be her half brother. She also declines a marriage with the brothel's financier, rejects the conventional advice of the wise friend, and firmly expels her mother from her life.
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Like Vivian Warren, the new computers of the 1890s were college graduates, though none left a record quite so dramatic as the one described in Shaw's play. Many were graduates of the new women's colleges: Newnham and Girton at Cambridge, Bedford in London, Radcliffe and Bryn Mawr in the United States. Most of these colleges had been formed in the late 1870s or early 1880s. Though only a small fraction of their students studied science, the numbers were growing, as were the expectations that the graduates would find useful work. “If it had been wasteful in the 1870s for women to sit idly home,” wrote the historian Margaret Rossiter, “it was much more intolerable for college graduates to lack useful and respectable work.” Rossiter notes that women moved quickly into laboratories but that they were “introduced in ways that divided the ever-expanding labor but withheld most of the ever precious recognition.”
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For the women of the 1890s, the social and biological sciences offered new opportunities for employment. These fields were incorporating new methods of statistical analysis, methods that required not only the traditional measuring of samples and tabulating of data, but also the more sophisticated calculations of the new mathematical statistics.

The advance of statistical analysis was closely tied to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in much the same way that astronomical calculations were linked to Newton's fundamental laws of motion. Darwin's theory suggested that biological organizations were shaped by the force of natural selection, that natural selection was still operating in the nineteenth century, and that the effects of natural selection might be measured in both animals and people. If it could be measured, it might provide an explanation for a host of biological and social phenomena, just as Newton's theory of gravitation provided an explanation for Halley's comet. Darwin claimed that evolution could explain the size and shape of animals. His followers speculated that evolution might explain differences in intelligence, behavior, and even social standing. “Those whom we called brutes,” quipped George Bernard Shaw, “had their revenge when Darwin shewed us that they are our cousins.”
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