Before Electronics, Computers Were Humans

Before scientific calculators, iPods, palm pilots, and laptops, there were computers. Biological computers, people who crunched numbers for scientific projects, engaging in the humbler levels of scientific work, arranged in military precision to collectively tackle the big problems of the pre digital era. These computers were neither mathematical prodigies nor mechanized automatons but eager and knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have been scientists in their own right. Many were women, minorities and youths who were prevented from pursuing math and science in more prestigious posts, eager to take part in any scientific role, they advanced the sum of human knowledge one detailed calculation at a time.

Human computing began with the invention of calculus in the late 18th century and a man named Edmond Halley. His work with comets led him to the edge of mathematics problems that exceeded his ability to solve. Attempting to compute the orbit of the comet which would bear his name, he realized his comet was at the mercy of the influences of the Sun, Saturn and Jupiter. So, with only a crude approximation of the comet's orbit, he cosigned the problem to the next generation of scientists. In the final edition of his synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets he wrote "I shall leave them [the unfinished calculations] to be discussed by the care of prosperity after the truth is found out by the event."

Halley's problem was picked up by Alexis Claude Claircut, a French mathematician, who created a new model for the orbit of Halley's comet, a model solved only by computation (crunching huge blocks of numbers into formulas). He and his two friends, astronomer Joseph Jerome Lalande and Reiebe Lepaurte, the wife of a clock maker, computed together at a table in Luxembourg for almost five months, using quill pens and linen paper. Ultimately, they discovered the orbit of Halley 's Comet, much to the dismay of contemporary scientists, most of whom were not comfortable with long, complex calculation. One mathematician, Rond d'Amembert, decried this "Spirit of Calculation" arguing that computation was more a product of brute labor then depth of intellect. Even so, to the dismay of critics and despite the fact Clairaut teams predictions were 31 days off, others started to organize computing groups. They realized Clairaut's important contribution to math and science was not calculating comet paths, rather, he was the 1st man to divide hefty math problems into divisions of labor, performed in parallel by different individuals.

The division of labor was a serious and well accepted new idea in the 18th century, popularized by the enlightenment economist thinker, Adam Smith, in his "The Wealth of Nations". In it he argued the division of labor produced the greatest increase in efficiency and output. The French Revolutionary government, heavily influenced by Smith, contracted a civil engineer, Gaspard de Prony to find mathematicians to produce 19 volumes of trigonometric and logarithmic tables for the new government. Under the guidance of the mathematicians, he hired and trained a team of 80 human computers , all of which had worked for the former aristocracy as servants and knew just the basic rules of math, to work the tables out.

Even with the division of labor, Prony's computers took 6 years to complete their volumes. It was apparent that no lone scientist of the day could afford the time nor the cost of such endeavors. Even the British computer Peter Barlow, who published a volume of his computations, complained that "The time employed in the computation, the expense of publication and the limited number of purchasers [of the works]" was simply not profitable.

Another Frenchman, Charles babbage, wished to build directly on Prony's work, but this time, with a machine to handle the more tedious and simple addition and subtraction problems. Babbage called his design "The Difference Engine" and with this machine, he argued, computations could have reduced Prony's total computing force from 96 to just 12 human computers. His machine was never accepted however, due in part to the outcry scolding his proposed device. Accountants, Tax lawyers and other manipulators of small numbers refused to accept a machine that, according to them, had the ability to write them a one way ticket to the unemployment line.

Most computing groups of the era refuted the machinery and instead, attempted to improve their work by organizing into rigorous hierarchies, especially in the military. In 1835 the English Royal Observatory used a team of "Boy Computers" aged 13 to 20, to process backlog astronomical observations and adjustments for Navy chronometers. Using computing guide sheets and imposing a rigorous schedule on the boys, this team proved highly effective in computing enormous calculus problems.

In the United States, the 1st large computing group, the National Almanac, a naval office, used the military command structure to control computation. Contrary to the English method, American computers were skilled mathematicians. Other computing groups were established in the 1870's, a time of rapid American industrialization. Their respective headquarters resembled factories and business offices, with scores of workers diligently laboring over tedious calculations that met strict deadlines.

World War One, the first mechanized war, required huge amounts of computers on both sides to produce map grids, surveying aids, navigation charts and artillery tables. With the men drafted into war, many computers were women and many of these women were educated.

In the United States, American Army operated two large computer groups, 60 on one site called the Aberdeen Proving ground, all required to gather and process data. The first World War initiated a period of growth for American mathematics and computation. The US department of Agriculture formed a computing bureau to handle the surge of statistics and data pouring in from the booming American Agriculture sector. Many large corporations had their own groups of computers at this time including the Bell Phone companies band of "Computer Girls", in charge of processing transmission data.

In the twenty year span between World War One's conclusion and beginning of the second, the profession of human computing started to professionalize by extensive promotion and organizing its structure, thanks in part to the founding of civic endeavors like the Mathematical Tables Project. The Mathematical Tables Project assembled hundreds of unskilled, formerly unemployed workers to compile a large number of tables of all sorts of mathematical information. It began in New York City in 1938 as part of the Works Progress Administration, which was a component of the depression era New Deal campaign. The workers involved in the Tables project were not mathematicians but the formerly unemployed who needed the security of a unionized hob in depression era America. Most knew little, if any, arithmetic, some were mentally disabled. During its ten year existence, the group produced 28 volumes of mathematical tables using the proven method of a rigid hierarchy to assemble its labor and the results they produced. The project spurred enough interest in the field for an academic journal to form, dubbed the Mathematical Tables.

When World War Two hit, the demand for human computers exploded on both sides. The first electronic computers were still several years distant and more complex technological warfare meant more calculations. Warehouses and war rooms filled with human computers calculated ballistic trajectories, shockwave propagation, air frame stresses, navigation tables and even cipher keys for encrypted messages. The Mathematical tables project is best known for their calculations in the Manhattan Project, a then classified government program that developed the first atomic bomb which won America the war on the Pacific front.

World War Two jump started the fledgling American and European economies. With the revival of industrial technology came unprecedented leaps and bounds in electronics. By 1945 the digital era was creeping up on the human computers quickly. Even their Computational Journal, the mathematical Tables, started to report on new "Electronic Computing Machines" that assured their timely demise.

Many in the field argued that human computers would never go out of style because humans rarely broke down and did not require costly maintenance, unlike the gargantuan computing machines of the day. In the Los Alamos IBM facility, Richard Feynman, then a research assistant, pitted a showdown between human computers and punch card calculator with both performing operations for the plutonium bomb. For two days, the human computers kept pace with the IBM calculator but on the third they fell behind, unable to sustain their initial fast pace. The IBM punch card calculator kept a steady pace.

After the war the era of human computing was dissolving fast. Bell laboratories invented the transistor in 1947, replacing bulky and unreliable vacuum tubes with fast switching, reliable transistors, biology and human labor gave way to binary code and electricity. The computing groups from the war and in branches of government had been disbanded. The handful that remained were replaced by electronic computers, some took positions as operators, maintenance or computer programmers. Even the Mathematical Tables Project was absorbed by the National Bureau of Standards in 1948.

Human Computing gave one last ovation with the HandBook of Mathematical Functions, a guide showing how to calculate, by hand, the higher mathematical functions in use. It was a bestselling science book for thirty years to come, until 1985.

The saga of Human Computing is one of tireless workers, enthusiastically toiling away for hundreds of years to advance Science, mathematics and the sum of human knowledge. Their only reward was a new electronic machine that took the name and place of those who were, the computers.