When Computers Were Human (21 page)

For the most part, Newcomb's computers were German immigrants from Foggy Bottom, the working-class neighborhood of Washington that served as a home to the almanac office. His most promising computer was a Swiss-German named John Meier. Meier “was the most perfect example of a mathematical machine that I ever had at my command,” Newcomb reported. Meier was hardworking and skilled at arithmetic. Newcomb also observed that, “Happily for his peace of mind, he was totally devoid of worldly ambition.” Meier lived the turbulent life of urban working classes and regularly needed Newcomb's assistance “as an arbitrator of family dissensions.”
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Meier suffered from an illness that he called “nervosity.” Newcomb gave no name to the disease, though he clearly believed it to be alcoholism. Meier, who had been able to limit the problems caused by his “nervosity,” began to lose control of his life when his wife left him. His children, a boy and a girl, proved more than he could handle alone. His son, testy and combative, showed that he was more than ready to pick fights with his father. The daughter, seventeen years old, had no one who could discipline her and was often found “in company with young men.”
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Newcomb avoided intervening in the failing marriage, but he advised Meier's son, counseled the daughter, and sought support from the family's pastor, the minister of the neighborhood German church. After several months, Newcomb tired of the demands upon his time and concluded that Meier simply was not capable of working for the almanac. He relieved Meier from service and requested the return of all books belonging to the almanac office. Using the popular notions of inheritance to justify his actions, he wrote that Meier “illustrates the maxim that ‘blood will tell'” and then added, “which I fear is as true in scientific work as in any other field of human activity.”
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Newcomb faced a second labor conflict that was resolved only after a hearing by the secretary of the navy. In this incident, Newcomb accused a senior staff member of being “incapacitated for effective work,” a phrase that probably implied that the worker arrived at the office drunk, and of taking “one week to do what a skilled computer should do in one or two days.” The staff member defended himself by claiming that Newcomb had showed favoritism to incompetent computers, that he was only
concerned with “advancing his personal reputation,” and that he had “diverted practically three-fourths of the appropriation made for the support of the Almanac Office for years past to a purpose for which it was not intended.”
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The hearing was reported in embarrassing detail by the local papers, but the issue was ultimately resolved in Newcomb's favor.
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However, the departure of the troublesome employee provoked the secretary of the navy to impose a little more control over almanac operations. “To avoid further trouble,” he wrote, he would “remove the almanac office from the Navy Department Building to the Naval Observatory, where it naturally belongs.”
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18. Simon Newcomb

Simon Newcomb was an astronomer, but like Pearson, he had a wide range of interests. He met Pearson during a trip to Europe in 1899.
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There was probably no way the two could have been friends, as their political values seemed to have little in common. Pearson, who was just starting the Hampden Farm experiments, seems to have treated Newcomb with respect, but there is no evidence that the two men corresponded after Newcomb's visit. The two came into contact again only after four years had passed and Newcomb had become the director of the Congresses that were planned for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.
Newcomb wrote to Pearson and asked if he would come to the United States to discuss the methods of statistics at one of the Congresses. Pearson had no interest in such an event and brusquely declined, stating that “I see no possibility of my being able to afford a visit to America from either standpoint of time or money”
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By then, Newcomb had retired from the Nautical Almanac Office and had turned to promoting the use of mathematics in “other branches of science than astronomy,” especially in the “examinations and discussions of social phenomena.”
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As this concept seemed to be related to the goals of Pearson, Newcomb wrote to the English statistician and asked him to help found an “Institute for the Exact Sciences.” “The nineteenth century has been industriously piling up a vast mass of astronomical, meteorological, magnetical, and sociological observations and data,” he explained to Pearson. “This accumulation is going on without end, and at great expense, in every civilized country.” His proposed institute would collect and process this data. One division of the organization would concentrate on data from experiments. A second group would assemble data that had been collected by observing social phenomena. The third division of the institute would be a large computing laboratory. The computers would process the data gathered by the other two divisions and would develop new mathematical methods that could be applied “to the great mass of existing observations.”
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The new institute would be expensive to organize and to operate, but Newcomb believed that he could find funds at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, a philanthropy founded by U.S. Steel president Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919). As it operated in 1904, the Carnegie Institution was a granting agency that provided small amounts of money to researchers scattered across the country. Newcomb believed that this strategy was misguided. “We find that centralization is the rule of the day in every department of human activity,” he argued. “Two men anywhere will do more when working together than they will when working singly.”
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He argued that a transformed Carnegie Institution, one that followed his model for an institute of exact sciences, would make better use of Carnegie's money and would be “in the true spirit and intent of its founder.”
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Pearson showed no enthusiasm for Newcomb's plan. Unlike Newcomb, who had spent all of his career working for a military agency, Pearson knew what it was like to ask for research funds with cap in hand and suspected that it would be difficult to extract money from the Carnegie Institution and nearly impossible to transform the organization, as Newcomb envisioned. He also may have felt threatened by the proposed organization, as the proposed Institute for the Exact Sciences would do work similar to that done at the Biometrics Laboratory. Newcomb
was not easily dissuaded by Pearson's objections, and he pushed the statistician to support the idea.
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It was a simple plan, he told Pearson, and it was important to avoid “thinking that I have in view something more comprehensive than I really have.”
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However, Pearson would not be moved and replied through a secretary that “Professor Karl Pearson is very much obliged for your letter re: Carnegie Institution proposals. He still considers the matter extremely difficult of execution.”
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By 1906, Pearson's Biometrics Laboratory could handle most of the tasks that Newcomb outlined for his Institute for the Exact Sciences. To be sure, it was smaller than Newcomb's proposed institute, and its mathematical methods had taken a circuitous route from the observatory and almanac before they reached the problems of evolution and human behavior. With each passing year, the computing staff was gaining skill and experience with different forms of calculation. By 1906, Pearson could report that the group had mastered the art of mathematical table making. He had set his staff to work evaluating the functions that described the average behavior of random quantities. A typical function was the bell curve, sometimes called the normal curve. This curve described how certain quantities, such as the heights of people or the width of a crab's body, clustered around a central average value. Statisticians need to know the area underneath the bell curve, a value that is tedious and time-consuming to compute. Pearson had his computers tabulate these values as a service to the general scientific community. “It is needless to say that no anticipation of profit was ever made,” wrote Pearson; the computers “worked for the sake of science, and the aim was to provide what was possible at the lowest rate we could.” When he published a book of these tables, he apologized for having to set a price on the work but claimed “That to pay its way with our existing public, double or treble the present price would not have availed.”
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The statistical tables were only a small part of the computations at the Biometrics Laboratory. The bulk of the computations summarized large sets of data and were difficult to undertake without an adding machine or other calculating device. Indeed, Pearson often referred to the work of calculation as “cranking a Brunsviga,” a phrase that understated the role of computation at the Biometrics Laboratory. Through the first decades of the twentieth century, every member of the laboratory undertook at least a little calculation each day. In 1908, one visitor complained “that preoccupation with mastery of details of calculation and technique obscured, to some extent, the full meaning and scope of the new science.”
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This new science, the science of mathematical statistics, offered a new way of studying a vast range of human problems, including those found in medicine, anthropology, economics, sociology, and even psychology, a field that was not quite separated from the discipline of philosophy.
However, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Pearson's new science was still linked, at least partially, to the study of human inheritance, a field that had acquired the name of eugenics. Francis Galton had been an early proponent of eugenics and had established a laboratory that collected family trees and looked for patterns of human inheritance. In his eighty-eighth year, Galton proposed to donate his laboratory and his fortune to University College London. The money would be used to support a professor of eugenics, a position that was given to Karl Pearson. Pearson's interest in eugenics is well documented and has been the subject of several scholarly studies. “When it came to biometry, eugenics, and statistics,” wrote historian Daniel Kevles, “[Pearson] was the besieged defender of an emotionally charged faith.”
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Grateful for the financial support, Pearson accepted the position, which put him in charge of two laboratories. “There is undoubtedly work enough for two professors,” he wrote, “but it is an ideal of a distant future.”
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CHAPTER EIGHT

Breaking from the Ellipse: Halley's Comet 1910

“B
EFORE THE
1835
RETURN
[of Halley's Comet] there were at least five independent computations of the orbit,” complained the English astronomer Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin (1865–1939), “and it is difficult to understand why an equal amount of interest is not shown in the approaching return.”
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As Crommelin well knew, astronomers had no pressing questions that would be answered by calculating the comet's orbit. Newton's analysis of the solar system had been accepted by astronomers as the laws of celestial motions. The contradictions to these laws, which were being explored by Albert Einstein, offered no idea that might be tested by the return of a comet. In 1909, less than a year before the expected return, there could be found only two calculations of the date of perihelion. The first had been done by Pontécoulant, the computer of the 1835 return. Pontécoulant had cycled his 1835 equations through one more orbit, though he had added data to his analysis and included new terms to account for the gravity of Neptune. As no new planets had been discovered since 1846, many scientists felt that there was nothing to add to the calculation, but Andrew Crommelin disagreed. “Doubtless [Pontécoulant] regarded it as certain that there would be numerous investigations when the time drew nearer,” he argued. “This is borne out by the fact that there are certainly some slips or misprints” in the computations.
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During the late nineteenth century, some astronomers had experimented with nontraditional ways of computing cometary orbits. The Swedish astronomer Anders Jonas Ångström (1814–1874) had adopted a statistical approach. Making no effort to address the physics of the orbit, he confined his attention to the dates of the comet's returns. From his analysis, he discovered that the average time between perihelions was 76.93 years and found that this period varied in a cyclical manner. With this information, he constructed a simple equation to predict the date of the perihelion. Applying this equation to all of the known sightings of the
comet, he computed the date of every return. In most cases, the equation missed the actual date by only a few months. Though these values did not approach the accuracy of Pontécoulant's 1835 calculation or even Alexis Clairaut's 1758 work, they were far more accurate than the equation's prediction of the 1910 return. Ångström's equation suggested that the first return of the twentieth century would not occur until 1913, three years after the generally accepted prediction. Crommelin was not impressed with this work. “We have here a curve which admirably fits 25 successive passages,” he wrote, “and yet the first time it is used to predict a return it breaks down utterly, the error being almost 3 years or three times the largest previous error.”
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