From the Smithsonian Magazine: "Women were in computing from its earliest days. Indeed, they were considered essential back when “computers” weren’t even yet machines. Just before the digital age emerged, computers were humans, sitting at tables and doing math laboriously by hand. Yet they powered everything from astronomy to war and the race into space. And for a time, a large portion of them were women. The rise of human computers began in the early hunt for Halley’s comet. The astronomer Edmond Halley had predicted that the celestial body would return and that the laws of gravity could predict precisely when. But those calculations would be too complex and brutal a task for any single astronomer. So the French mathematician Alexis-Claude Clairaut decided to break the work up—by dividing the calculations among several people. In 1757, he sat down with two friends, the young astronomer Jérôme-Joseph Lalande and Nicole-Reine Lepaute, a clockmaker’s wife with a penchant for numbers. At the time, women had little opportunity in science, but Lalande “loved women, especially brilliant women, and promoted them in both word and deed,” the historian Ken Alder has written. After arduous weeks of cranking away, the trio predicted that the comet’s closest approach to the sun would be between March 15 and May 15 the next year. They were slightly off—the comet rounded the sun on March 13, two days early—but it was the most accurate forecast yet. The age of human computers began. And not a moment too soon. By the 19th century, scientists and governments were beginning to collect reams of data that needed to be processed, particularly in astronomy, navigation and surveying. So they began breaking their calculations down into tiny basic math problems and hiring gangs of people to solve them. The work wasn’t always hard, though it required precision and an ability to work for long hours. Mostly, the computers were young men. But by the late 19th century, some scientists realized that hiring women could reduce the cost of computation. The growth of education and middle-class prosperity had produced a generation of young women trained in math. So when the Harvard Observatory decided to process years of astronomic data it had gathered using its telescope, it assembled one all-female team of computers. They could be paid as little as less than half of what men got, notes David Alan Grier, author of When Computers Were Human. “By supply and demand and all the other nasty things, they can hire them more cheaply than men,” Grier says. “And the chief observer brags about it!” During World War I, the Army hired a small group of women to calculate artillery trajectories. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration began hiring its own human calculators to support engineers. Women were welcome as computers partly because the work was viewed as a dull, low-status activity. Men with elite educations generally wanted no part in it. Not only were women hired, but so were blacks, polio survivors, Jews and others who were routinely iced out of job opportunities, Grier points out. “The reason that these pre-electronic computation jobs were feminized is they were seen as rote and de-skilled,” says Mar Hicks, a historian and author of Programmed Inequality. It wasn’t true, though: “In a lot of cases, the women doing these computation jobs actually had to have pretty advanced math skills and math training, especially if they were doing very complex calculations.” The work could require superhuman endurance, though. “They had to keep working eight hours a day doing the same equation over and over again—it must have been mind-numbing,” notes Paul Ceruzzi, author of Reckoners: The Prehistory of the Digital Computer. Decades later, one human computer—Marilyn Heyson—recalled the job as intellectually interesting, but a marathon. “I had moments when I said, ‘Did I go to college for this job?’” she told Sarah McLennan, an assistant professor at Virginia State University. In World War II, the need for computation exploded. Over 200 women were hired at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering, creating artillery-trajectory tables for the Army. By 1944, as Grier documents, about half of all computers were women. One contractor of the Applied Mathematics Panel used the term “kilo­girl” to refer to 1,000 hours of female calculation work. Another astronomer spoke of “girl-years” of work. Few expected that computing would lead to a career, though. The idea was, mostly, to use the women before they married. Astronomer L. J. Comrie wrote a 1944 Mathematical Gazette article entitled “Careers for Girls,” in which he declared that female computers were useful “in the years before they (or many of them) graduate to married life and become experts with the housekeeping accounts!” After the war ended, the space race was on, and it had a ravening need for computation—crunching numbers on projects like wind-tunnel tests of wings. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA (the precursor to NASA), hired several hundred women as computers at its Langley base in Virginia, the historian Beverly Golemba estimated. NACA and NASA were relatively progressive employers, paying the young women far better than they’d get in other forms of office work; they even employed married women with children. One woman who stumbled into the field in the late 1950s was Sue Finley. “I loved math,” she tells me. She studied logic in college and was disenchanted with the sales and typing jobs on offer after she graduated. One day, while applying at an engineering firm, she was offered work as a computer, and found joy in its rigor and puzzle-solving. Later, she landed a computing job with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she labored all day using a clattering, breadbox-size electric Friden calculating machine. It was, she says, a remarkably egalitarian oasis in 1950s America. “The engineers, the male engineers, always listened to us,” she notes. At its bases, NASA employed nearly 80 black women as computers, says Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures. One of them, Katherine Johnson, was so revered for her abilities that in 1962, John Glenn asked her to personally verify the flight path of his first launch into space on the Friendship 7 mission. The astronauts didn’t trust the newfangled digital computers, which were prone to crashing. Glenn wanted human eyes on the problem. “They had a tremendous amount of respect for these women and their mathematical abilities,” says Shetterly. “The male engineers often were not good mathematicians. So the women made their work possible.” Still, some friction existed. Women who asked for promotions got stonewalled or turned down: “For women who wanted to move up, who wanted to be supervisors—particularly if that involves supervising men? Not so much.” Soon, the human computers faced an even more existential threat: digital computers, which promised to work with far greater speed and to handle complex math—like inverting a 10x10 matrix—beyond the ken of even the most adroit human with a pencil. Women, though, were among the original coders of these strange new digital brains, because in the early days programming, too, was seen as dull work. The earliest programmers for the Eniac—the military-funded first programmable general-purpose computer—were entirely women, plucked from the ranks of the Army’s human computers. And though they wound up inventing brilliant coding techniques, they received none of the glory: When the Army showed off the Eniac to the press, running lightning-fast ballistics-crunching algorithms, it didn’t introduce the women who’d written the code. By the ’60s and ’70s, human computation was dying. But some women made the transition to the new world of software—including Sue Finley. After taking a weeklong course on the language Fortran, she began a decades’ long career coding on NASA’s space missions, including software that tracked probes to Venus. At 82, she remains at work as an engineer in the Deep Space Network; she also works on entry, descent and landing of spacecraft and still thrills to the mental challenge of debugging some gnarly problem in the code that peers into space. “It’s a mystery, solving a mystery,” she tells me. “It’s fun when it’s successful.” Source: smithsonianmag.com/science-n…