When Computers Were Human (33 page)

In the summer of 1931, when Richtmyer withdrew his offer to Fry, neither the National Research Council nor anyone else appreciated the potential opportunities for human computers that would be offered by the Great Depression. The difficult times encouraged new applications of the computing methods that had been developed during the First World War.
The statistics of hog production could analyze the collapse of industrial production or the growing reach of poverty. The mathematics of exterior ballistics could help identify the trajectory of the stock market. Rather than being a hindrance to large computing projects, as Richtmyer feared, the economic collapse encouraged the formation of large computing staffs, since rising unemployment reduced the cost of labor.

The issues that had encouraged the National Research Council to form the MTAC committee did not vanish when they withdrew their offer to Thornton Fry. As computing groups grew and expanded, they looked for the kinds of activities that could be found in the more established disciplines of astronomy or physics or electrical engineering. They desired a unified literature, textbooks, standard ways of training computers, journals to disseminate new ideas, and a professional society that might identify pressing research problems. Such institutions would not appear overnight, as the National Research Council's actions concerning the MTAC committee portended. Human computers would have to make due with interim solutions while they worked to establish computing as a more formal scientific field. Their efforts were complicated by the fact that the same forces that encouraged the expansion of computing laboratories also encouraged the development of computing machinery. At times, it appeared that scientists were caught between two contradictory trends. The first trend was the effort to elevate the status of those who worked with numbers. The second trend pushed human computers to the margins of scientific laboratories and replaced them with precise, unfailing machines.

Harold Thayer Davis, professor of mathematics at Indiana University, shared his last name with the founder of the American
Nautical Almanac
, Charles Henry Davis, but the two had no direct family connection and had little in common. Charles Henry was a naval officer, a member of the Boston elite, and a highly disciplined scientist. Harold Thayer, or H. T., was a reluctant soldier, the son of a western land speculator, and a self-described “ultra-crepidarian,” a shoemaker who would not “stick to his last,” a workman unable to focus on the tasks he had been trained to do.
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At different times in his life, he showed the prospects of becoming a classical scholar, a physician, and even a billiards player. The strongest connection between H. T. and Charles Henry was a common interest in scientific computation. Mathematical calculation was the “open sesame,” wrote H. T. Davis, “to many undiscovered areas of human knowledge.” Though H. T. would never form a computing organization as important as the Nautical Almanac Office of his namesake, he would prove to be adept at performing large calculations under difficult circumstances.

H. T. Davis was born in Beatrice, Nebraska. His grandparents had come west to make their fortune in cattle and gold, but great wealth had eluded them. His mother was the daughter of a farmer. His father was the city treasurer. When Davis was young, his family moved first to Idaho and then to Colorado in search of a more healthful climate for his father, who suffered from asthma. He entered college in 1910, shortly after Halley's comet receded from sight. “As viewed from Cañon City,” Davis later recalled, “[the comet] hung just above the western mountains with a brilliant head and a tail that swept across the sky through an arc of 130 degrees.” He speculated that the return “might be chosen as the beginning of an epoch in science that has had no parallel in the history of the world.” But at the time, he had no interest in studying science. When he entered Colorado College that fall, he intended to study history, literature, and economics rather than mathematics and computation.
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Davis became interested in computation after his father fell ill in 1912. Needing to provide for his family, Davis left college and took a job with a civil engineer. The engineer was grading land and needed an assistant to measure newly excavated drainage canals and compute the amount of soil that had been removed. Davis spent several weeks diligently tracing the topography of the land and slowly summing up the volume of dirt. As he grew tired of the drudgery, his “ingenuity was awakened,” and he saw a new way to organize the calculations. As he recalled the event, his plan reduced weeks of work to a task requiring “two or three hours.”
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When his father recovered his health, Davis returned to Colorado College with a new interest in mathematics and computation. He graduated with a degree in mathematics and spent two years teaching the subject at a local high school. When one of his professors took a job at Harvard, Davis followed him in order to study for a master's degree. He arrived in Cambridge in 1917, just as the United States was entering the First World War. Unlike Oswald Veblen or Norbert Wiener or Elizabeth Webb Wilson, Davis originally had no interest in going to war. He believed that America should stay out of Europe's problems and that President Woodrow Wilson was a “dangerous demagogue”; but during the summer of 1918, he had a change of heart and enlisted in the army. It was a conversion of little consequence, for the armistice was declared while he was at a training camp in South Boston.
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Returning to Harvard, Davis was drawn to empirical subjects, rather than the more theoretical topics that had been introduced by German mathematicians some twenty-five years before. While studying theorems and proofs, he complained that “one grew sick, indeed, at the torrent of abstract symbolism which was poured forth at every [mathematical] seminar.” His studies combined the two central methods of scientific calculation, statistical methods and calculus-based methods. He took classes
with a mathematical statistician and worked in a Harvard statistical laboratory. “It was in this laboratory,” he remembered, “that [I] first saw [a] multiplying machine, a nice, black, shiny Monroe calculator, which operated with a crank.” When the time came for his master's exam, his professors asked him to undertake a broad survey of the computational methods and to show how to compute a class of functions called elliptic integrals. Writing of the experience in the third person, as he often did when describing his life, he said that “the subject suited his taste and he undertook it avidly.”
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From Harvard, Davis went first to the University of Wisconsin to begin doctoral studies and then to Indiana University to teach. He had not finished his doctorate when he arrived at Indiana, but he had taken the job in order to support his new wife and family. The country was in the midst of an economic recession, the difficult time that followed the end of the First World War. Davis was grateful for a university job, but he was surprised at the relative poverty that he found on the campus. Once the university had been the promising new school of the Midwest, but its fortunes had fallen. Davis reported that the department of mathematics “was housed in a single dingy room in an old building used mainly by chemistry. Desks were crowded together and the author found space for only a small table in the place assigned to him.”
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The university president admitted that young faculty members worked so hard that they had “little leisure, little energy left. [They] can not brood by the hour over [their] own studies as a man must to grow rich in them.”
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In spite of the conditions at Indiana University, Davis remembered the school as a place of great freedom, an opportunity to “go his own way and explore those paths into which his own interest and his own imagination” directed him. In 1927, with his doctoral work behind him, Davis decided that he wanted to build a statistical computing lab like one that he had once used at Harvard. The national economy had recovered, but Indiana University had no money to support his research. Davis was able to acquire some funds from a local charity, a foundation that had been created by a grateful alumnus of the university. The grant was small, a “few hundred dollars at most,” but it allowed him to acquire “a battery of electrically driven Monroe calculators.” The dean of the business school found a room for the new laboratory in the attic of the library, a space previously used as an artist's studio. The university offered $86 to give the walls a fresh coat of paint, install electric lights, and provide some tables for the machines.
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Thornton Fry once quipped that H. T. Davis computed “various things as they occurred to him.”
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The first test of the new computing lab came from the physics department. One of the physicists was experimenting with beams of light. Davis was attracted to one experiment that produced
a “beautiful circular pattern with seventy rings, which broadened as they neared the circumference.” The physicist wanted to compute the amount of energy in each ring as a way of testing the wave theory of light. The problem had nothing to do with statistics, but Davis saw that the calculation would provide “an immediate use for his machines” and volunteered to do the work.
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The calculation required Davis to use some values of the Bessel function, the function that had been tabulated by the Edinburgh Mathematics Laboratory and the British Mathematical Tables Committee. Finding none of these tables in the Indiana University library, Davis decided that he would create a new table for his own use. He became absorbed in this extra task, preparing pages of Bessel functions that would not be needed for his calculation. Only after the table was complete did he return to the original physics problem. When all the work was done, Davis and his colleague discovered that the final values for the energy in the light did not match the empirical measurements from the experiment. The two reviewed the figures, looking for an error in the calculations, but found nothing of significance. They eventually realized that Davis had used an incorrect value for the frequency of the light. At this point, they had two ways to adjust their results. They could either recalculate the energy levels using the correct frequency or redo the experiment using light that matched the frequency from the calculation. Davis conceded that repeating the experiment would be “arduous,” but he claimed that it would be easier to adjust the experimental mechanism than to perform the calculations a second time. His colleague eventually agreed with this reasoning, returned to the laboratory, and performed the experiment with the new frequency of light. This time, reported Davis, “the experimental evidence and the mathematical values coincided exactly.”
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Davis emerged from the calculation with a new table of the Bessel function and the notion that he should create a compendium of mathematical tables.
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He recognized that there was an epic irrationality in such an idea. “Although the machines were present in the laboratory there were no funds with which to operate them,” he wrote, “no trained personnel to hire even if funds had been available, and not the slightest chance to print and publish to the world the fruits of the heroic computation could it actually be achieved.”
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Under such circumstances, most mathematicians would have not even attempted the project, but Davis believed in the idea and had the ability to make others believe in it as well. He recruited volunteer computers from among the university's mathematics students and convinced them that a book of mathematical tables was a grand project, a goal worthy of their noblest efforts. He reported that the computers arrived in the laboratory “fired with enthusiasm” and that their calculations “filled the laboratory with their music.”
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The computers finished their work in 1932, three years after the stock market crash and one year after the National Research Council had decided that it was not a good time to publish a bibliography of tables. Davis estimated that it would cost $2,100 to typeset his manuscript of tables, print the pages, and bind the book, a sum that far exceeded the annual salary of a professor, yet he seemed undeterred by the economics of his project. He was a partner in a small scholarly publishing firm, a company that he had named Principia Press, after Isaac Newton's great work. Davis confessed that Principia Press was a “reckless adventure,” as there seemed to be little demand for their eclectic list of scientific and philosophical books, but the firm had done surprisingly well in spite of the poor economic conditions. “Any one who entered a printing plant with a thousand dollars in real money,” he observed, “was a person to be met with open arms.”
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The press was able to raise enough money to publish his manuscript, which he entitled
Tables of Higher Mathematical Functions
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After releasing this first volume, Davis started work on a second collection of tables. For this calculation, he paid his computers with money that he received from one of the New Deal agencies, the National Youth Administration, or NYA. The National Youth Administration was created as a “relief program for the middle class.” It provided training and educational activities for young men and women who were working to support their families. Most of the National Youth Administration activities were designed for high school students, but one of its program provided funds to employ college students. These NYA grants paid students to serve as part-time administrative aides, to work as teaching assistants, and to perform research for faculty. Like every other program of the New Deal, the National Youth Administration was a controversial activity. Many educators refused to take NYA funds, arguing that it was “the first step in the establishment of a federal education system competitive with the schools.”
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Even at schools that could easily employ research and teaching assistants, deans often had to push their faculty to find some use for an NYA grant.
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