Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - NASA's Human Computers

Starting point is 00:00:00 In today's world, computers are ubiquitous. You are listening to this podcast right now on some sort of computing device. However, before computers were machines, the word computer was given to people. Computers were people who computed. In fact, in the early days of NASA, the space program relied upon these human computers to do most of their calculations, most of whom were women. Learn more about NASA's human computers and the role they played in the development of spaceflight on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Starting point is 00:00:44 What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The first use of the term computer actually dates back to the early 17th. century. The first known written reference to the word computer was actually in 1613. And a computer

Starting point is 00:01:22 was nothing more than a person who computes, in the same way that a baker is someone who bakes and a cleaner is someone who cleans. The first computers were primarily tasked with calculating the orbits of planets. Many mathematicians during the Renaissance would actually call themselves computers as frequently as they would mathematicians. Being a computer was often an introductory position that somebody would take before becoming a full-blown scientist. Computers help calculate the position of Halley's Comet and were later used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by the British Navy to help determine navigational tables for ships. At this point, the job of computer was primarily reserved for men. There were only a few women who were employed as computers at this time, women like Mary

Starting point is 00:02:04 Edwards, who was employed by the British Board of Longitude. When the Americans created their own navigational tables, one of their best computers was a woman by the name of Maria Mitchell, who discovered a comet which was named Miss Mitchell's Comet. The later half of the 19th century saw a shift in the hiring of computers. Whereas women were mostly excluded from being computers previously, now they were actively being sought out. Computing was not a physically demanding job, and women tended to command lower wages than men at the time. By hiring women, you could get more computing power for the same amount of money. There were more and more projects which required more extensive computations. If you remember back to my episode on weather forecasting,

Starting point is 00:02:45 the United States National Weather Service was created during this period, and it was originally under the control of the Army Signal Corps. They extensively used human computers in their forecasting. The Harvard University Observatory created a group known as the Harvard Computers. By 1880, the Harvard computers were entirely women. The women were tasked with categorizing and cataloging stars and the enormous stream of data that was coming in from astronomers. In addition to weather and astronomical calculations, there were a host of hand calculations that were required at this period of time. Entire books were filled with tables of trigometric calculations, fluid dynamics, and other engineering calculations. Engineers and scientists relied on these books in an era

Starting point is 00:03:28 before mechanical computers existed. The First World War saw large teams of female computers who calculated artillery and navigational charts for the war effort. The way that these human computers worked is actually not dissimilar to the way that electronic computers work today. Computers were given very specific calculations to perform. It was usually broken down into a series of steps, aka an algorithm. Task were then usually split up between teams, aka they were multi-threaded. Then the same calculations would often be assigned to different groups for redundancy. If one group made an error, then hopefully it would be caught by the other group. If this process seems really slow, tedious, and time-consuming,

Starting point is 00:04:10 then you can probably appreciate why machine computing was developed. The story of the use of computers by NASA actually starts well before the creation of NASA. It starts in part with the establishment of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in the 1930s. JPL's first female computer was a woman by the name of Barbara Canwright. She joined JPL in 1939 and was tasked with extremely difficult computations which would often take weeks. She would have to calculate things like the efficiency of various rocket fuels or the rocket equation. The rocket equation, if you aren't familiar, is the devilishly complicated equation to determine

Starting point is 00:04:47 the amount of fuel needed to launch something on a rocket. Let's say you have a hundred kilogram payload you need to launch. That would require a certain amount of energy, which would require a certain amount of fuel. The problem is that fuel has mass and requires its own fuel, and then the container for that fuel requires fuel. You can see how this can get really complicated really fast. When the Second World War started, a woman by the name of Macy Roberts was put in charge of JPL's computers. They needed to significantly expand their computer program for the war effort, and Macy decided to go with a department made entirely of female computers. This was both for departmental cohesion, and because there

Starting point is 00:05:25 weren't that many men available due to the war. Over in Virginia, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, or NACA, the predecessor to NASA, had established the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. The Langley facility also needed a team of computers to conduct calculations from wind tunnel tests. In 1935, a core team of five women was hired to be the computers for Langley. In the 1940s, the team expanded due to the war effort, and the Langley facility made the highly unusual move for the time to hire African American women as computers. Due to the Jim Crow laws in Virginia in the 1940s, the black female computers had to work in a different building from their white counterparts, as well as used different restrooms and lunch facilities. The program was integrated after the war when NACA integrated all of their facilities nationwide.

Starting point is 00:06:13 Most of the advanced calculations conducted on behalf of the war effort in World War II were done by women working as computers on the home front, at the facilities I mentioned, and at many more factories and laboratories around the country. Their contribution was often recognized by the terms which were used in measuring computing power. Instead of using terms like man hours, some contractors adopted terms such as a kilo-girl, a unit that reflected 1,000 hours of time spent by a computer, almost all of which were women. Likewise, the term girl year was used for larger computational projects, which would require over a year of combined computing time. These women were the white-collar equivalent of Rosie the Riveter. As I explained back in my episode on the history of NASA, the 1950s saw the start of the U.S. space program,

Starting point is 00:06:59 and this saw an explosion in the need for new and more human computers. While the first electronic computers were being built in the 1950s, they were too expensive and couldn't yet outperform a bunch of humans with pencils and paper. Human computers were still needed to perform the actual calculations, which would put people and satellites into orbit. There were electronic computers used in solving equations for spaceflight, However, the early engineers for NASA actually didn't trust them. They felt that human calculations would be more accurate because that was what they had become accustomed to.

Starting point is 00:07:32 When some of the first electronic computers arrived, they were often given to human computers as it was seemed to be part of their job responsibility. As such, many of the first computer programmers were the same women who were human computers themselves. They were the modern-day versions of Adelavelace, to whom I have previously dedicated an entire episode. because the NACA and later NASA were so dependent upon female computers, they adopted policies that would not be seen in the workforce for decades. The women who worked there received much higher salaries and they could earn elsewhere for similar office work. They were given maternity leave, albeit unpaid, and married women and women of children were employed, which was very uncommon

Starting point is 00:08:12 at the time. In the late 50s and early 60s, as the space program began to launch its most important missions, it was these women, who by now numbered in the hundreds across the country, who were responsible for calculating the orbital trajectories upon which the missions would succeed or fail. These computers worked on Explorer 1, the first American satellite to go into orbit. The Ranger missions, which impacted the moon, and even the more complicated surveyor missions which soft landed on the moon, they all had to be calculated by hand. The computers did everything for the manned missions as well, up to and including the Apollo program. There are several of these human computers who deserve special mention.

Starting point is 00:08:51 Catherine Johnson was a black woman who worked at the Langley facility in Virginia. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics, being just the third African-American in U.S. history to do so, and went to work as a computer for the NACA in 1953. She quickly developed a reputation for being one of the top computers at NASA. She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard on NASA's first human spaceflight in 1961. When John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, he personally requested that Johnson verified the calculations performed by an electronic computer because he trusted her more than a machine.

Starting point is 00:09:26 She became the first woman at NASA to get authorship credit for a report that she helped write, titled Determination of Asmeth Angle at Burnout for placing a satellite over a selected Earth position. By the time of the Apollo missions, she was more than just a computer, but her skills were still requested. She verified the orbital trajectories for the Apollo 11 mission and assisted on the Apollo 13 mission when they had to calculate their return home on the fly. She worked at NASA until 1986, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was the subject of a recent movie titled Hidden Figures starring Taraji P. Henson. And fun fact, just because I don't know if I'm ever going to have another episode where I can mention this, Taraji Henson is the great, great grandniece of the polar explorer Matthew Henson.

Starting point is 00:10:10 The other woman who started her career as a computer that I should mention is Sue Finley. Sue Finley began her career at JPL in 1958 in the computer pool and still works at JPL today. Today she's an engineer on NASA's Deep Space Network, which is the system that communicates with interplanetary spacecraft. As of my recording this episode, she is still working full time at the age of 85 and she is most likely the last person still employed by NASA who was a human computer. I'm guessing that most of you can write the end of this story. By the late 60s and especially in the 70s, computers had become powerful and cheap enough that humans couldn't compete with them anymore. Engineers had overcome their initial distrust and had learned to trust the result that the machines gave them. And that is why we no longer use the term computer to refer to people anymore. Nonetheless, for about 100 years, much of the mathematical heavy lifting which was required for fields such as engineering, astronomy, and navigation was contained.

Starting point is 00:11:10 conducted by teams of human computers, the vast majority of which were women. And if it wasn't for them, the modern world would look very different today. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Lily Marshall from Apple Podcasts in the United States. She writes, So impressive and enlightening. I followed Gary's global education work for over a decade, and I'm thrilled about his Everything Everywhere Daily podcast. As a teacher and parent, I find this podcast ideal to play to help kids learn about history and the world in bite-sized 10-minute tidbits.

Starting point is 00:11:50 As a lover of learning, it's perfect to help energize my brain and to reinvigorate my understanding of humanity. As a visual learner, I appreciate that the show transcripts are available to supplement my listening. Oh, and Gary has the best voice for podcasting. Can't wait for the next 900 episodes. Well, thanks, Lily. Lily, I have to confess, is actually one of the first. my friends. We met back in 2010 in Valencia, Spain, where we were both traveling at the time,

Starting point is 00:12:15 and we hung out for a few days. It's only taken two and a half years, but I finally got her to listen to the podcast. Remember, if you leave a review, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - NASA's Human Computers

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