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  Like her father’s, Ada’s work outlived her, although it would be nearly a century before it was properly recognized. It took until the beginning of the computer age, when the magnitude of their prescience became undeniable, for her Notes to be republished, in a British computing symposium; its editor marveled, in 1953, that “her ideas are so modern that they have become of great topical interest once again.” Ada was lucky to have been born wealthy, noble, and relatively idle. Even without a professional path, she was able to educate herself, and she had time to privately follow her passions. Still, she could have done so much more, and it’s evident that she wanted to. Many brilliant women—born in the wrong centuries, the wrong places, or hoping to make an impact on the wrong field—have suffered similar fates, and far worse.

  Reading Ada’s correspondence, I see someone I wish I could reach out to, across the centuries, and say: you’re right. Nobody can see it but you. But you will have inheritors. Granddaughters and great-granddaughters. They will sprout up everywhere, all over the world, and work with the same dogged, unrelenting focus. Other people will keep getting the credit, until one day they won’t anymore. And then your history will be written, a hundred times, by teenage girls at their desks in the heart of their kingdoms, on machines beyond your wildest imagination.

  KILOGIRLS

  By her insistence, Ada Lovelace was buried next to her father in a small church near his ancestral estate of Newstead Abbey. Her coffin, finished in soft violet velvet, bore an inscription of the Lovelace family motto, an axiom she’d embraced as her own while toiling over her notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. LABOR IPSE VOLUPTAS, it read. “Labor is its own reward.”

  Labor would remain its own reward for a long time. By the end of Ada’s century, although technically gifted women like her could find employment as computers on either side of the Atlantic, their formal titles weren’t accompanied by commensurate status or compensation. In the 1880s, for example, the astronomer Edward Charles Pickering hired only women to analyze and classify stellar data for his Harvard lab, including his own maid, Williamina Fleming. Although he would later champion the women working in the observatory, even presenting papers on Fleming’s behalf at astronomical conferences, Pickering didn’t hire them out of advocacy. He’d just wanted twice as many workers on the job, given that women were paid half the going rate. “The Harvard Computers are mostly women,” complained the director of a competing observatory, which employed only men, to a colleague, and they can be “got to work for next to nothing.”

  Known to history as “Pickering’s Harem,” the Harvard Computers cataloged ten thousand stars; Williamina Fleming, the erstwhile maid, discovered the Horsehead Nebula and helped develop a common designation system for stars, while her colleague Annie Jump Cannon could classify spectra at a rate of three stars a minute, and with a remarkable consistency that allowed her to discover a number of new and unusual stars. These women quite literally mapped the cosmos, but their wages were equivalent to those of unskilled workers—paid between twenty-five and fifty cents an hour, they earned barely more than they would have if they’d worked in a factory.

  In the United States, the number of female office workers increased near the end of the nineteenth century, with a significant uptick after the American Civil War. Major wars have an unmistakable effect on gender and work, opening new employment to women; in this case, many were battlefield widows, looking to support themselves by helping to coordinate the affairs of an increasingly complex world. After the Civil War ended in 1865, as historian David Alan Grier writes, female computers were no longer “the talented daughters of loving fathers” as Maria Mitchell had been, “or the intelligent friends of sympathetic men,” like Ada. They were “workers, desk laborers, who were earning their way in this world with their skill at numbers.”

  The First and Second World Wars, too, ushered thousands of women into the workplace as typists, clerks, and telephone operators, to say nothing of riveters. But it was the telephone companies that were the first mass employers of a female workforce. In 1891, eight thousand women worked as telephone operators; by 1946, nearly a quarter million. Women were a nimble workforce. capable of working collaboratively in networks and fluid groups—we still speak of secretarial “pools”—adaptable to the needs of the enterprise. They staffed switchboards, kept records, took dictation, and filed documents. These rote office tasks are now increasingly performed electronically by digital assistants and automated telephonic systems, many of which still speak, in the default, with female voices.

  As female voices buzzed across the growing telephone networks in the first half of the twentieth century, the term “girl” was used interchangeably with “computer.” One member of the Applied Mathematics Panel, a division of the National Defense Research Committee that administered a human computing group in the early 1940s, ballparked a unit of “kilogirl” energy as being equivalent to roughly a thousand hours of computing labor. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics—the predecessor to NASA—kept its own pool of “girls,” which included black women as early as the 1940s, working in a segregated west section of Langley Research Center. One of these, the mathematician Katherine Johnson, who joined the Space Task Force in 1958, hand calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard’s and John Glenn’s spaceflights. The Computing Group at Langley ran all its analytical calculations by hand, using the material ephemera of the gig: slide rules, magnifying glasses, curves, and early calculating machines. Johnson is often quoted as saying that she was a computer back in the days “when the computer wore a skirt.”

  The last significant human computing project in the United States, a reference book of mathematical tables funded by the Works Progress Administration—and overseen by another female mathematician, Gertrude Blanch—was published just as computing machines made it effectively obsolete. Human computing thrived as a stopgap between the emergence of large-scale scientific research and the capacity of hardware to carry out its calculations; eventually, the tireless machines that emerged from the spike in computer science research during the Second World War wore down their competition. After that war, the machines took over, decisively and permanently, shifting the definition of the word “computer” for the first and last time. The job description, which once required a unique cohesion of human effort, changed too: onetime human computers went from rivals to keepers, no longer executing the functions of the machine but rather programming those functions to be executed.

  Human computing offices performed in girl-years the number crunching that machines can now perform in fractions of a second. But for a few centuries, groups of women working in hives and “harems” were the hardware: distributed biological machines capable of prodigious calculations beyond the mental capacities of any single individual, calculations that cataloged the cosmos, charted the stars, measured the world, and built the bomb. That the mathematical labor might have been, in some cases, broken down into relatively simple steps for each individual is beside the point. It’s the accumulation of all those steps, executed simultaneously and collectively, that prefigured our connected, calculating, big-data world. Alone, women were the first computers; together, they formed the first information networks. The computer as we know it today is named for the people it replaced, and long before we came to understand the network as an extension of ourselves, our great-grandmothers were performing the functions that brought about its existence.

  The arrival of computing machines may have emptied human computing offices, but it didn’t push women from the field. Quite the opposite: many women who had been computers themselves found work tending their replacements. Female hands lifted from pencils and slide rules to desk calculators and switches, then relays and punch card tabulators. Coaxing information into and out of the new machines was considered a woman’s job, too, on the level with typing, filing documents, and patching phone calls from place to place. Not that it was easy. Dealing with early mechanical computers
required a keen analytical mind and limitless patience. Just like the women whose math moved mountains, early computer programmers and operators were tasked with enormous, intractable problems. Their creative solutions often meant the difference between life and death.

  Chapter Two

  AMAZING GRACE

  Grace Hopper was thirty-six, tenure tracked, and married when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. She taught mathematics; her husband, Vincent, literature. The couple spent their summers fixing up an old farmhouse in New Hampshire, on sixty acres of land they’d bought during the Depression for $450. They played badminton, and Grace hooked rugs, a skill she’d picked up as a kid, summering at the family compound on Lake Wolfeboro.

  Grace and Vincent lived the usual headaches of married academics. As Grace began her graduate studies at Yale, Vincent was working toward his doctorate at Columbia. Somehow she made time to help him research his eight-year-long thesis project, a history of number symbolism, by reading Syrian, Babylonian, and medieval texts on the subject. When she started teaching at Vassar in 1931, she audited courses in her spare time, picking up fluency in astronomy, geology, physics, and architecture. Her intellectual ambidexterity was legendary on campus: to impress students, she’d sometimes write a German sentence on the chalkboard with her left hand, and when she got to the middle, she’d switch to her right hand and finish the sentence in French.

  When Grace was a junior teacher at Vassar, she picked up the classes students dreaded and nobody else wanted to teach, like calculus, trigonometry, and mechanical drawing. To revitalize them, she updated old schoolwork with new concepts, much as good teachers do now. To make topography fun, she’d tell her mechanical drawing classes they were tracing the borders of fantastic imaginary worlds, and she updated the ballistics problems common to calculus textbooks to involve rockets, which were then beginning to capture the public imagination. As a result, her classes swelled with students, drawn in from departments across the college. It earned her the respect of her superiors and the unbridled resentment of her colleagues.

  In the winter of 1941, Grace and Vincent were in New York City. Vincent had found a job teaching general literature at New York University’s School of Commerce, and Grace had arranged a yearlong faculty fellowship from Vassar to study at NYU herself, under Richard Courant, one of the few major figures in applied mathematics. It was a nice vacation from the breakneck weekly commute they’d been driving along the Hudson, between Poughkeepsie and the city, in a Model A Ford she called Dr. Johnson. Grace liked Courant, who specialized in differential equations with finite differences, something she’d learned “one jump ahead of the students” to teach her calculus course at Vassar. Courant had a cute accent—he was a German émigré—and his lectures were always engaging. She enjoyed tackling unorthodox problems under his tutelage, even if he sometimes scolded her for taking equally unorthodox approaches to them. All in all, it was a “gorgeous year.” Then everything changed.

  Grace and Vincent heard the announcement on a tinny little radio, sitting at a double desk in the study they shared, surrounded by books: a violent and sudden attack at a naval base in Hawaii had left 2,403 Americans dead. The following day, the United States declared war on Japan; within a week, the conflict extended to Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy.

  Everybody in Grace’s life wanted into the war. Vincent tried for a commission but was turned down for wearing glasses. Grace’s brother, scrawny as her whole family was and with a blind spot about level with a chalkboard, didn’t make the cut, either. Undeterred, they both volunteered under the draft and got in. Grace’s cousin became a nurse. By the summer of 1942, everyone seemed to be gone; all the men enlisted, all the women in her family in the military’s new female branches, save her sister, who had children. Grace wanted to do her part, too, but she was sixteen pounds underweight and considered too old for service. Mathematics professors, being a classified profession, weren’t allowed to enlist without a release. She took a summer appointment at Barnard College to teach special war-preparedness mathematics courses for women, but it wasn’t enough. All summer, midshipmen would march by the Barnard dormitories from a training ship on the Hudson, and Grace would watch them, longing to be in the navy, too.

  Back upstate, she chafed with loneliness and directionless patriotism. “I was beginning to feel pretty isolated sitting up there,” she said, “the comfortable college professor.” She aggressively lobbied Vassar to let her go into the service. She gave the college an ultimatum, which wasn’t much of one: six months or she’d leave anyway. And even though she was too old, and too thin, and her eyesight wasn’t much better than her brother’s, she did. The day those bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the path of completely respectable middle-class life had been at Grace Hopper’s feet, but she wouldn’t take one step further. Within a few years, everything forked: she separated from Vincent, she quit her job, and she joined the U.S. Navy. It wasn’t the first remarkable thing she’d ever done, and it would not be the last.

  Grace turned thirty-seven on her first day at the United States Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School in Northampton, Massachusetts. She picked up the navy talk quickly—bulkheads, decks, and overheads. She’d always been good with languages. She’d taught herself German, Latin, and Greek by reading closely with a dictionary at her side, corralling the new words into each sentence like mathematical variables. Mastering military protocol was trickier, especially because it was so often at odds with social expectations. Rank and civility collided in doorways. Sometimes she’d stop to let admirals go through the doors first, but they’d try to treat her like a lady, a comedy of errors. “We usually ended up going through together,” she recounted. “Which was bad.” But she liked the drills. She thought they were like dancing.

  She was smaller than the other recruits, and older, training alongside the students she’d been teaching only months before. But after a career in academia, commuting around the Northeast while trying to maintain two homes and a strained marriage, the constraints of military life felt like a vacation. She didn’t need to think about anyone else anymore; she didn’t even need to pick out her own clothes in the morning. There were few comforts—even nylons were rationed—but her domestic responsibilities had disappeared. “I just reveled in it,” she told a historian years later. Unlike the youngsters she enlisted with, she “had the most complete freedom . . . I just promptly relaxed into it like a featherbed and gained weight and had a perfectly heavenly time.” With meat rationed, she ate fresh fish from the New England coast and lobster every Sunday night. She was named battalion commander and graduated first in her class, in itchy lisle stockings.

  Although Grace was certain the navy would have sent her to sea had she been a man, the newly minted Lieutenant Hopper would never spend a day on board a navy ship. Instead, something in her employment history rang a bell—of all things, her study of finite differences at NYU, under Richard Courant. The navy changed Grace’s orders overnight. In training, she’d assumed her military career would be spent cracking enemy codes with the elite group of mathematicians and logicians at the Communications Annex, the navy’s cryptographic brain trust, overseen by one of Grace’s former Yale professors. She even studied cryptography to prepare for that eventuality. Instead, the navy sent her to Harvard, where, as she liked to say, she became the third programmer of the world’s first computer.

  When she arrived at Harvard in July 1944, she promptly got lost. The Navy Liaison Office was nowhere to be found, and Grace hadn’t been given any information about where she was to be stationed, or why. She wandered the campus, until she was finally led into the basement of the university’s Cruft Physics Laboratory by an armed guard. A hawkish, six-foot-four man with an exaggerated widow’s peak greeted her at the door, already irritated. The first words out of his mouth: “Where have you been?” Taken aback by the sight of him, she said she’d just come from Midshipmen’s School and had spent the morning looking for the right place. “I wa
s a little bewildered and at that point of course thoroughly scared of a commander,” she remembered. “I told them you didn’t need to do that,” he muttered. He didn’t think women needed service training. He asked if she’d found a place to live yet. She told him she’d only just arrived. “Well,” he answered, “get to work and you can get a place to live tomorrow.”

  Get to work she did. Grace never saw any action during the war, but she did tame two beasts. The first was this bristly man, Lieutenant Commander Howard Aiken. While a graduate student in physics at Harvard, Aiken—a great admirer of Charles Babbage—had designed a mechanical arithmetic device capable of solving any problem, from basic arithmetic to differential equations, that could be simplified down to numerical analysis. It was a matter of convenience: his own doctoral dissertation had been a nightmare of extensive, tedious calculations. His machine, built by IBM in exchange for the rights and donated to the university for wartime use, would be Grace’s second beast. Because Aiken had imagined it as a series of daisy-chained calculators doing the work of a dozen men, it was an Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Everyone at Harvard called it the Mark I computer.

  The Mark I was assigned to the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance to run ballistics problems for the war effort, and Aiken needed mathematicians who knew their way around differential equations with finite differences, precisely what Grace had been studying under Richard Courant that glorious year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. But Grace didn’t know any of this yet. As she made Aiken’s acquaintance, she heard a racket in the next room. Aiken led her to the source of the sound. “That is a computing engine,” he said. Grace examined the thing, stunned. “It was all bare,” she remembered; weighing in at ten thousand pounds, the Mark I stood a hulking eight feet tall, with thousands of moving parts and some 530 miles of wiring. Its inner workings were exposed, churning and noisy. “All I could do was look at it,” she recalled. “I couldn’t think of anything to say at that point.”