When Computers Were Human (58 page)

Before Gertrude Blanch could settle in Dayton, before she could buy a house and learn the neighborhoods, she was contacted by Phil Morse about a project that he called the “handbook for the ordinary computer.”
⁶⁷
Morse had concluded that the new electronic computers would be of little help to his generation of scientists and engineers. He speculated that a decade would pass before the typical scientist would have easy access to them. From observing the machines at MIT, he had learned
that “programming took weeks, not minutes,” and that small and midsized problems could be handled much more quickly by hand.
⁶⁸
Morse told Blanch that he wanted to hold a conference to discuss such computing problems and asked who should be invited to it. Blanch gave him a long list of “tablemakers,” as she described the computers, who worked at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, the navy's proving ground at Dahlgren, Virginia, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the University of Illinois, though she was quick to characterize one Illinois faculty member as “anti-table.”
⁶⁹
She did not list Arnold Lowan, as she was not quite sure how he would feel about the invitation. Lowan had already received an invitation from Morse and had replied that “my chief interest in the conference in mathematical tables derives from the assumption that perhaps it is still possible to bring to life the ‘Math Tables Project' in
New York
.”
⁷⁰
After Morse explained that he had no interest in reviving the Mathematical Tables Project, Lowan declined to come.

When the conference met in September 1954, most of those in attendance were senior computers of the Second World War: Gertrude Blanch, John Todd, Milton Abramowitz, and even Blanch's former critic Wallace J. Eckert, who had become an employee of the IBM Corporation. The list also included Nicholas Metropolis from the Manhattan Project; John Tukey, one of the Applied Mathematics Panel mathematicians from Princeton; and the recently fired John Curtiss, who had a temporary job at New York University. Adele Goldstine, who had worked with the computers at the University of Pennsylvania, came only as a spouse. Morse had invited her husband, Herman, because of his contributions to the ENIAC.
⁷¹

As they discussed the problems of midsized calculations, the conference members quickly agreed that they needed to produce a book containing “tables of usually encountered functions” as well as graphs, mathematical analyses, and “other techniques useful to the occasional computer.”
⁷²
They gave the project a shorthand name, the “new Jahnke-Emde,” a term which referred to the book
Funktionentafeln mit Formeln und Kurven
(
Tables of Functions with Formulae and Curves
), by Eugen Jahnke and Fritz Emde.
⁷³
This book was nearly fifty years old but remained popular with those who worked with applied mathematics.
⁷⁴
Twice during the 1940s, the National Bureau of Standards had suggested revising the book. The first time, in 1941, the bureau was preparing for war and could not find the money for a revision. The second time, in 1947, bureau scientists were organizing their new applied mathematics laboratory and were confidently predicting that the electronic computer would remove the need for such a book. Seven years later, when questioned by Phil Morse, the leaders of the bureau acknowledged that the electronic computers were not the solution to all calculating problems
and that they could find some money for a new Jahnke and Emde.
⁷⁵
The book would be prepared by the bureau's Computation Laboratory and would be edited by Milton Abramowitz and Irene Stegun, two of Blanch's closest lieutenants from the Mathematical Tables Project. It would contain twenty-two chapters, each written by a different volunteer. As the conference came to a close, Blanch agreed to write a chapter on Mathieu functions. After a little prodding, the sulking Arnold Lowan agreed to contribute a chapter as well.
⁷⁶

The project was formally named the
Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables
, but the mathematicians who worked on the book usually called it “the handbook” or “AMS 55,” after its place in the National Bureau of Standards publication list, or “Abramowitz and Stegun,” after its editors. Milton Abramowitz did the bulk of the preliminary work and recruited most of the contributors, but he died on a hot and sticky July day in 1957, when he imprudently attempted to mow his lawn in suburban Washington, D.C.
⁷⁷
Irene Stegun retrieved the plans for the book from her partner's desk and finished the project. She corresponded with the contributors, corrected their chapters, and slowly pulled the material into a complete reference work.

The handbook required a decade to complete, a decade that marked a radical change in the electronic computer. In 1954, computers were handcrafted devices that could be found only in government laboratories and large businesses. By 1964, the year of the book's publication, computers were standard products that could be purchased from a dozen different vendors. The actual date of publication coincided with the announcement of the IBM System 360, a family of machines that IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson Jr. proudly called “the most significant product announcement in IBM history.”
⁷⁸
The System 360 would anchor IBM's product line for twenty-five years and would move computing into offices and laboratories that had never had access to the machines of 1954.
⁷⁹
To those who were promoting the new electronic computers, the
Handbook of Mathematical Functions
seemed an anachronism, a tool for modern science that had been produced by the old human computers. Scientific calculation had become a small part of the subject known as computer science. Computer scientists were increasingly interested in databases, sorting methods, the manipulation of text, and the representation of human reasoning. The tables and formulas of the handbook appealed only to a small group of computer researchers.

Though it no longer represented the central issues in computation, the
Handbook of Mathematical Functions
ultimately validated the vision of Phil Morse. Neither the IBM 360 nor any of the other machines announced in 1964 was able to handle all of the small and midsized scientific
computations that were found at universities and government research labs. Scientists, still having to do some calculations by hand, turned to the contents of the handbook for assistance. They gave good reviews to the book and purchased copy after copy for their laboratories. Within a few years, it became the most widely circulated scientific text ever published.
⁸⁰
“I don't know what I'd do without it,” wrote Blanch, who called it “one of the books I would keep, if I go anywhere, even if I don't look at it again.”
⁸¹

The
Handbook
sat on Blanch's desk until she left government service in 1967. It stayed with her in retirement as she wrote a textbook on calculation. In spite of her prediction, it was not taken on her tours of Europe, though one can easily imagine her discussing references to the book with her traveling companion, Ida Rhodes. It was found in her personal effects after her death. As she looked back on her career, the
Handbook of Mathematical Functions
was the symbol of all that she had accomplished. It appeared at the perihelion of her time in government service, her moment at the center of power. She had just finished a successful decade with the Aerospace Research Laboratories. She had published
twenty mathematical papers, been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, been promoted to the highest rank possible for a government scientist, and been publicly recognized for her contributions to the air force.
⁸²
Blanch had even learned a little about electronic computers, though she was never interested in programming. Programming could be left to assistants. As a newspaper article described her, Blanch was “the brain behind the mechanical brain,”
⁸³
but a photo taken at the same time shows her glowering at a new electronic computer.

44. Gertrude Blanch and the electronic computer

45. Gertrude Blanch and President Lyndon Johnson

On March 3, 1964, just a few weeks before the
Handbook
was released to the public, Gertrude Blanch arrived at the White House in Washington, D.C., wearing the finest of her clothes and the tallest of shoes. Along with five other women, she was ushered through the east entrance, escorted down a long hallway, and asked to wait in a small public room with a presidential photographer and a few representatives of the press. President Lyndon Johnson soon walked into the room, greeted the women, and took his place at a podium. “I believe a woman's place is not only in the home,” he began, “but also in the House and Senate.”
⁸⁴
Blanch and the other five women glanced at each other and smiled knowingly. None of them held an elective office, but all of them served in government. They had come to the White House as part of Lyndon Johnson's
tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt, who had died the prior November. Johnson had wanted to emphasize the impact of the former First Lady by honoring six distinguished women in government service who had begun their careers when Roosevelt lived in the White House.
⁸⁵
After the speech, Johnson moved around the room and shook the hands of his honored guests. He paused briefly with Gertrude Blanch, bending over to share a word or two. Like Blanch, he had started his professional career at a work relief agency. Between 1935 and 1937, he had served as director for the Texas office of the National Youth Administration and had distributed research funds to the universities of his state. Had there been more time for president and mathematician to speak, they might have found that they shared much in common, but Johnson quickly strode out of the room and vanished down the hall that led to the Oval Office.

From the White House, a car carried Blanch to a Washington air force base, where a dinner had been prepared in her honor. There, amidst friends and colleagues, she relaxed and smiled and danced. These were rare expressions of emotion for one who kept herself under tight discipline. That night, she enjoyed herself as if the whole world moved in orbit around her, for she had heard her president commend her as the top mathematician in the air force, as a founder of the scientific discipline called numerical analysis, as a patriotic citizen who had served in time of war for the Applied Mathematics Panel, as Gertrude Blanch, who had once worked for the WPA and had once managed a staff of human computers.

EPILOGUE

Final Passage: Halley's Comet 1986

T
HE COMPUTATIONS
for the 1986 return of Halley's comet began shortly after Gertrude Blanch retired from scientific life in 1967. Though she was not the last professional human computer, her departure coincided with the final days of many computing offices. The National Bureau of Standards, now identified as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, closed its Computational Laboratory and reassigned the few remaining veterans of the Mathematical Tables Project to other divisions. The American
Nautical Almanac
moved from punched card equipment to electronic computers. Observatories were either acquiring their own small computers or purchasing the services of larger machines. A few businesses, such as insurance firms and petroleum refiners, retained small staffs of calculating assistants, but these, too, were being replaced with IBM 370s, DEC PDP-8s, Burroughs B-6500s, and other computers that were powered by electricity and sported numerical names.

With the 1986 return, astronomers returned to the problem of testing Newton's theory of gravitation in order that they might reduce Andrew Crommelin's 1910 discrepancy of two days, sixteen hours, and forty-eight minutes. The basic principles of Isaac Newton's gravitational theory were never questioned, but researchers hoped that some slight modification might produce a more accurate prediction of the comet's perihelion. One organization prepared ephemerides with a gravitational force that was slightly weaker than the one identified by Newton. Another team postulated the existence of one more giant outer planet, which they identified as “Planet X,” and tried to find an orbit for the planet that would account for Crommelin's missing two and a half days. A final group hypothesized that the discrepancy was created by the comet itself. They suggested that the nucleus of the comet acted like a weak rocket engine because of a phenomenon known as outgassing. As the comet approached the sun, its surface was warmed by the light until it boiled away as vapor. This vapor created the tail and produced a gentle thrust that slowed the
comet's approach to the sun and sped its retreat into the distant spheres of the solar system.
¹