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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women in computing | 2/10 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:17:23.795787+00:00 | kb-cron |
In the early 1920s, Iowa State College, professor George Snedecor worked to improve the school's science and engineering departments, experimenting with new punch-card machines and calculators. Snedecor also worked with human calculators most of them women, including Mary Clem. Clem coined the term "zero check" to help identify errors in calculations. The computing lab, run by Clem, became one of the most powerful computing facilities of the time. Women computers also worked at the American Telephone and Telegraph company. These human computers worked with electrical engineers to help figure out how to boost signals with vacuum tube amplifiers. One of the computers, Clara Froelich, was eventually moved along with the other computers to their own division where they worked with a mathematician, Thornton Fry, to create new computational methods. Froelich studied IBM tabulating equipment and desk calculating machines to see if she could adapt the machine method to calculations. Edith Clarke was the first woman to earn a degree in electrical engineering and who worked as the first professionally employed electrical engineer in the United States. She was hired by General Electric as a full engineer in 1923. Clarke also filed a patent in 1921 for a graphical calculator to be used in solving problems in power lines. It was granted in 1925.
=== 1930s === The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which became NASA hired a group of five women in 1935 to work as a computer pool. The women worked on the data coming from wind tunnel and flight tests. The Works Progress Administration hired women as human calculators in order to support engineers during World War II. This was largely seen as menial labor, and much of the work was focused on calculations and less on problem solving. Barbara “Barby” Canright was recruited for California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1939 as a human calculator, largely working with engineers in order to determine thrust-to-weight ratios and other various important aeronautics calculations.
=== 1940s ===
"Tedious" computing and calculating was seen as "women's work" through the 1940s resulting in the term "kilogirl", invented by a member of the Applied Mathematics Panel in the early 1940s. A kilogirl of energy was "equivalent to roughly a thousand hours of computing labor." While women's contributions to the United States war effort during World War II was championed in the media, their roles and the work they did was minimized. This included minimizing the complexity, skill and knowledge needed to work on computers or work as human computers. During WWII, women did most of the ballistics computing, seen by male engineers as being below their level of expertise. Black women computers worked as hard (or more often, even harder) as their white counterparts, but in segregated situations. By 1943, almost all people employed as computers were women; one report said "programming requires lots of patience, persistence and a capacity for detail and those are traits that many girls have". NACA expanded its pool of women human computers in the 1940s. NACA recognized in 1942 that "the engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could." In 1943 two groups, segregated by race, worked on the east and west side of Langley Air Force Base. The black women were the West Area Computers. Unlike their white counterparts, the black women were asked by NACA to re-do college courses they had already passed and many never received promotions. Women were also working on ballistic missile calculations. In 1948, women such as Barbara Paulson were working on the WAC Corporal, determining trajectories the missiles would take after launch. Women worked with cryptography and, after some initial resistance, many operated and worked on the Bombe machines. Joyce Aylard operated the Bombe machine testing different methods to break the Enigma code. Joan Clarke was a cryptographer who worked with her friend, Alan Turing, on the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park. When she was promoted to a higher salary grade, there were no positions in the civil service for a "senior female cryptanalyst," and she was listed as a linguist instead. While Clarke developed a method of increasing the speed of double-encrypted messages, unlike many of the men, her decryption technique was not named after her. Other cryptographers at Bletchley included Margaret Rock, Mavis Lever (later Batey), Ruth Briggs and Kerry Howard. In 1941, Batey's work enabled the Allies to break the Italians' naval code before the Battle of Cape Matapan. In the United States, several faster Bombe machines were created. Women, like Louise Pearsall, were recruited from the WAVES to work on code breaking and operate the American Bombe machines. Hedy Lamarr and co-inventor, George Antheil, worked on a frequency hopping method to help the Navy control torpedoes remotely. The Navy passed on their idea, but Lamarr and Antheil received a patent for the work on August 11, 1942. This technique would later be used again, first in the 1950s at Sylvania Electronic Systems Division and is used in everyday technology such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.