CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Professional Ambition

LIKE THE ADDING MACHINES of the 1880s, the calculators of Stibitz, Atanasoff, and Aiken coincided with a world’s fair. This fair, which opened in the spring of 1939, was hosted by New York City. “It is arranged,” wrote the author H. G. Wells, “to assemble before us what can be done with human life today and what we shall almost certainly do with it … in the near future.” After pausing for a digression, he added, “It is a promotion show.”¹ Like the World’s Columbian Exposition, now almost half a century in the past, the Long Island fair displayed the technologies that would be embraced by American culture. Visitors could examine television receivers, FM radios, prototypes of divided highways, and primitive fax machines. They could inspect the products of both Bell Telephone Laboratories and International Business Machines. IBM president Thomas Watson hosted a company conference at the fair and delivered a rousing speech on the future of punched card technology.²

In the midst of all the symbols of material progress stood the WPA hall with its proud and slightly self-contradictory inscription, “This building shows the wealth created by the skill and artistry of America’s unemployed.” The presence of the WPA had been controversial and a little embarrassing to government leaders. The opening of the exhibit had been delayed by labor troubles, an ironic touch that delighted opponents of the New Deal.³ When the WPA finally allowed visitors into the building, more than three weeks had passed since the start of the fair. A signature book by the front door recorded the opinions of those who came into the exhibit during those first days. “The WPA must go,” signed former presidential candidate Alf Landon, but his comment was altered by a WPA supporter so that it read, “The WPA must go on.”⁴

“The exhibits cover every aspect of WPA activity,” wrote one reporter, “from art, music, and drama to the manufacture of clothing for the poor.” Above the displays, WPA employees had written slogans that portrayed the agency in a heroic light. “Work is the Right of every American,” read one panel, and “Work Builds Better Communities,” claimed another.⁵ Over the science projects was written, “Work Increases Knowledge,” a phrase that Gertrude Blanch and Arnold Lowan would have liked to claim for the Mathematical Tables Project. As far as we know, there were no calculations from the project on display.⁶ Only the powers of integers had been officially published. The second book, the volume on the exponential function, was still being printed.

During that first summer of the fair, Gertrude Blanch was still attempting to accumulate the information that she needed for her computing plans. Like others before her, she was learning that there was no single literature of computation. When she needed some mathematical theorem or technical analysis, she would send a junior member of the planning committee to the New York Engineering Societies Library with instructions to scan through some collection of journals, page by page if necessary. The fact that many on the planning committee were immigrants or the children of immigrants simplified such searches, as much useful material could be found in foreign language publications, such as the Archiv der Mathematik und Physik, the Mémoires couronnés et autres mémoires publiés par l’Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, and the Wissenschaftliche Schriften des Donetz-Tecknikums des Genossen Artjem zu Stalin.

The one organization that might have been able to assist the Mathematical Tables Project with its library searches, the Subcommittee on the Bibliography of Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation of the National Research Council, was still moribund and unfocused. By the spring of 1939, the leaders of the National Research Council had lost all hope that A. A. Bennett would be an effective leader of the group. After the initial flurry of activity in 1935 and 1936, Bennett had all but abandoned MTAC. His communications with the National Research Council had became a litany of excuses. “Unexpected and extended interruptions have retarded the work in a way that was not anticipated,” he reported that April.⁷ Most of these “unexpected interruptions” had come from the Aberdeen Proving Ground, where Bennett served as a consultant. The proving ground had expanded its computing facility with a differential analyzer, the machine that had been invented to solve differential equations. “During the last part of the year,” wrote the base commander, “the analyzer has been used in the computation of two firing tables with gratifying results.”⁸ As gratifying as such results may have been, they did not suggest that the new computing machine would replace the human computers or eliminate all work for A. A. Bennett. The analyzer “saves a great amount of labor when a group of related trajectories are to be computed,” reported one of Bennett’s colleagues, but the device was sensitive and suffered from “mechanical inaccuracies.” The adjustment of the analyzer was “a delicate matter, requiring so much time that for a single trajectory [it was] more economical to compute in the usual way.”⁹

Sometime that spring, the leaders of the National Research Council quietly asked Bennett to resign his chairmanship. In his stead, they appointed Raymond Claire Archibald, who was, like Bennett, a professor of mathematics at Brown University. Archibald was a tall, imposing figure, filled with energy and topped by a head of hair that had retained its red color. He was a Canadian by birth and a distant cousin of Simon Newcomb, a connection that gave him great pride.¹⁰ He was also unmarried, a fact that he prominently displayed in his biographies and resumes.¹¹ The council had twice passed over Archibald when it had sought a chair for MTAC, but in 1939, it was willing to accept anyone who might actually complete a bibliography. Archibald had already proven that he could be a leader of mathematicians, though not quite a leader with the stature of Veblen or even A. A. Bennett. During the First World War, Archibald had edited the American Mathematical Monthly, a prime job in ordinary times but one that seemed small compared to the experience of the Aberdeen veterans. Following the war, he had held several minor positions in the American Mathematical Society and, in the process, acquired the reputation of being difficult. He had once drawn a quarrel from Oswald Veblen over plans for financing the American Mathematical Society. “I gather from your letter,” Veblen had scolded, “that you have not understood my position in the matter. But on re-reading my [note to you], I don’t see how I can make it clearer. So I fear all I can do is to ask you to reread the last paragraph of that letter.”¹²

36. R. C. Archibald in his office at Brown University

When R. C. Archibald accepted the chair of MTAC, he put all of his considerable personality into the job. Within days of his appointment, he had written to the committee, asking members for “reactions, advice, comments and suggestions on various matters.” He explained that the committee would act as a “clearing-house of information about Tables,” that it would cooperate with England’s Mathematical Tables Committee in order “to avoid duplication of effort,” and that it might “take steps toward initiating the development of other tables which were thought to be desirable.”¹³ He proposed to establish a broad and inclusive committee that could direct any kind of computational work. Before the summer had ended, he had reorganized the group along lines that had been developed by the Mathematical Tables Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a structure that split the broad literature of mathematical tables into twenty-one different classes.

Many of these categories had little in common. Integral tables (M) involved no calculation at all. Interest tables and actuarial tables (N and O) were prepared for businesses, not laboratories. Many engineering tables (P) contained collections of data that had been gathered from experiments. In addition to these categories, Archibald proposed one final division, Z, that would not deal with tables at all but would prepare the bibliography of calculating machines. For each division on the list, he intended to create a small section of four or five members. The chairs of the sections plus Archibald would form an executive group.

The plan would create an unusually large committee for the National Research Council, and it did not take long for the organization’s staff to object to Archibald’s plans. “There is nothing in the by-laws or procedures of the Council to contravene what Professor Archibald proposes,” lamented the council secretary. “However, I cannot help feeling that making a difference between classes of membership in this way introduces a rather invidious distinction.”¹⁴ Grateful for any action within the committee, the council was willing to let Archibald proceed, even though one scientist on the council compared the new MTAC structure to the myriad agencies of Roosevelt’s New Deal and quipped that Archibald “apparently has caught the alphabet fever from the Government.”¹⁵

Undeterred by the objections of the council, Archibald began making the appointments to the committee. He assigned H. T. Davis the chair of Section E, which dealt with material covered in Davis’s encyclopedia of functions. L. J. Comrie was given the leadership of the computing machine group, Section Z. To that section, Archibald added George Stibitz of Bell Telephone Laboratories. For Section K, which dealt with statistical tables, he offered the chair to W. W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993), a U.S. Department of Agriculture statistician and a former student at Karl Pearson’s Biometrics Laboratory. To catalog the literature of actuarial tables, Archibald turned to the New York insurance industry.¹⁶ He also attempted to expand the international presence on the committee by recruiting Tadahiko Kubota of Japan’s Tohoku University.¹⁷

For the section on astronomical tables, Section Q, Archibald turned to the obvious choice, Wallace Eckert of the Columbia University Astronomical Computing Bureau. “Many thanks for considering me in connection with this Committee,” wrote Eckert in reply to Archibald. “I believe the work important, and am willing to do all I can to make the [committee] a success.”¹⁸ Other than L. J. Comrie, Eckert was the only section leader drawn from the astronomical community, a discipline that had once defined scientific computation. Eckert’s little section also contained the only female member of MTAC, a Naval Observatory computer named Charlotte Krampe (1904–1969).¹⁹

By the fall of 1939, Archibald had appointed the core members of his committee and had raised a $15,000 publication fund from the Rockefeller Foundation.²⁰ At first, this money seemed to be a sign of Archibald’s success, but it brought him into conflict with the leadership of the National Research Council. The council leadership believed that they had ultimate control over the funds, as MTAC was a subcommittee of their organization. Archibald claimed that he alone could decide how the money was spent. The disagreement was entirely academic until Archibald published his first bibliography and sent copies of it to the council. In the box, he included an invoice for $61.73.²¹

“I cannot understand the item at the bottom of your second page,” wrote one leader of the council, Luther Eisenhart (1875–1965), “unless you mean that since the N.R.C. will use these copies for distribution the N.R.C. should pay the fund for them. This would raise an issue which I have never heard of before.”²² Whether or not the council had heard of the issue was of little matter to Archibald. He argued that the Rockefeller Foundation funds were his responsibility and that he was required to recover every dime he spent on publication, including the value of the books sent to the National Research Council.²³ Fundamentally, Eisenhart was sympathetic to Archibald. He, too, was an applied mathematician and understood that $15,000 publication funds were rarely given for mathematical research.²⁴ Yet Archibald’s claims verged on insubordination, if not outright mutiny. He considered ousting his committee chair, but he confided to a colleague that “I do not know whom I could possibly secure to replace him and who would be willing and able to do the work in the way in which he has been doing it.”²⁵

The conflict waxed and waned for nearly two months as Archibald pushed his claim on the council and Eisenhart deflected his demands. Archibald seemed to grasp, though perhaps for misguided reasons, that he had a secure hold on the MTAC chair. For his part, Eisenhart wanted to resolve the conflict without showing any emotion and without weakening the discipline of the other subcommittees. The resolution came when Archibald, frustrated and impatient with the exchange, accused Eisenhart of using the “insidious political methods of the Roosevelt administration.”²⁶ Eisenhart may actually have chuckled at receiving this overblown piece of rhetoric, but to Archibald, they were clearly fighting words. The MTAC chair held his ground until he was moved by the still, small voice of conscience. “I beg,” he wrote to Eisenhart three days later, “that you regard the last five lines of the fourth paragraph of my letter to you of July 29 as never written, that we may be ‘as before.’”²⁷ Eisenhart accepted the apology, confirmed the council’s authority over MTAC, but spared Archibald’s ego by paying the $61.73.²⁸

It is easy to view the fight between Archibald and the National Research Council as a clash among strong personalities or the attempt of a maverick scientist to establish a small empire of his own. In the right hands, it might even have been turned into an entertaining evening of musical satire. However, the event captures the state of computing in 1939 and suggests that the discipline had reached a critical point in its history. With only a few exceptions, computing laboratories had always been under the control of scientists whose interests lay elsewhere. The directors of computing groups had been astronomers, surveyors, electrical engineers, ballistics engineers, physicists, statisticians, meteorologists, and economists. Only people like H. T. Davis and L. J. Comrie could claim to have computing as their primary interest, and of these two, Comrie had been trained as an astronomer.

With the emergence of Archibald and MTAC, Comrie and the Scientific Computing Service, Davis and his books on mathematical functions, Blanch and Lowan and the Mathematical Tables Project, human computers began to claim that they had an independent discipline, that they commanded a body of knowledge that stood apart from astronomy, mathematics, and statistics. This was not a philosophical question but a practical issue with practical consequences. If computing was an independent body of knowledge, then it should have a standard way of training new computers, a publication to disseminate new ideas, and an organization that could coordinate research. “If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “[Americans] form a society.”²⁹ In 1939, MTAC appeared to be the germ of a new computing society, but before it could claim such a role, Archibald would have to gain the support and confidence of the major computing organizations. His work was complicated by the emergence of the new computing machines and by the start of a new world war, which promised far more work for human computers than had ever been found by Oswald Veblen and his friends in the summer of 1918.

September 1939 brought a new urgency to America’s scientific and industrial research. On the third day of the month, Germany ended the armistice of 1918 by invading Poland. Great Britain rushed to the aid of the Poles, and France followed. In increasing numbers, Americans believed that they would be drawn into the war, but this time they were not rushing into the fray. They had seen enough of battle during those brief months in 1918, when the American Expeditionary Force had fought on the western front.³⁰ Following the invasion, President Franklin Roosevelt had to remind the country that “though we may desire detachment, we are forced to realize that every word that comes through the air, every ship that sails the sea, every battle that is fought, does affect the American future.”³¹

The scientific veterans of the First World War volunteered for a second round of military research. Having watched the army take control of the National Research Council in 1917, they formed a new coordinating committee that included the interests of both the army and the navy but kept the balance of power in the hands of civilian scientists. This organization, the National Defense Research Committee, divided its work among broad alphabetic classes of military needs. The committee had a Division A for armor and ordnance, B for bombs and explosives, C for communications, D for detection devices and controls. To these four sections was added a fifth, Division E, that dealt with the rights of the inventors. There was no division M for mathematics and computation, as such research did not seem to be a high priority, even though both military services moved to strengthen their existing computing laboratories. The army invested $800,000 in the Aberdeen Ballistics Research Laboratory, using part of those funds to expand the computing laboratory.³² The navy, which had just retired the director of its Nautical Almanac Office, went in search of a leader who understood computing machinery.

The almanac had seen little change since the retirement of Simon Newcomb, some forty years before. In Simon Newcomb’s last years, the navy had closed the almanac office in Foggy Bottom and moved the computers to the new Naval Observatory, which overlooked the monuments and government offices from atop St. Alban’s Hill. Since that time, the group had been overseen by a sequence of dependable but unimaginative directors. A review by the naval officers remarked that almanac directors of the early twentieth century “did see to it that the Almanacs were produced on time,” but they had done nothing to advance the capabilities of the office.³³ Using blunter language, L. J. Comrie concluded that the computing laboratory was “stagnant.”³⁴ Under either judgment, the almanac was unprepared to handle the work that came with the start of hostilities. For nearly thirty years, the American almanac staff had shared the burden of ephemeris computations with the almanac offices of England, France, Germany, Russia, and Spain.³⁵ This collaboration had begun in 1912, when the United States had officially abandoned the prime meridian in Washington. It had been suspended for the First World War and been resumed in the 1920s. Now, for the second time in twenty years, the almanac staff found that they were computing the tables for the Nautical Almanac without the full assistance of its European collaborators. Germany withdrew from the agreement to share almanac computations, and France found itself unable to contribute its part. As the staff struggled with additional work, naval officers were designing a new almanac for airplane navigators. This almanac would be exceptionally detailed, as airplane navigators needed astronomical positions at fifteen-minute intervals. Without this kind of detail, navigational computations would forever lag behind the actual position of the plane by a distance of 10 or 50 or even 200 miles.³⁶

There were many senior astronomers and mathematicians who were qualified to lead the almanac office and at least a few who were ambitious to fill the role, but the navy wanted only one individual, Wallace Eckert of the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau, as the Columbia University computing facility was now called. Eckert was flattered by the initial overture but was not especially interested in the position. He was happy in New York and saw no reason to leave. The superintendent of the Naval Observatory, unwilling to accept Eckert’s refusal, persisted in his efforts to entice the Columbia astronomer to Washington. He appealed to Eckert’s patriotism, suggested that Eckert would have more influence in the national capital than in New York, and openly flattered Eckert with the notion that he “would go down in history as a second Newcomb.” In a moment of emotional vulnerability that seemed out of place for a naval officer, the superintendent confessed, “I have never wished for anything so hard in my life as that you will accept the position and come to Washington.”³⁷

Eckert finally accepted the position in the spring of 1940. He left the Columbia Astronomical Computing Bureau in the hands of an assistant and moved to Washington. He arrived at the almanac intending to install IBM equipment in the office and teach the computers the methods that he had developed in New York, but as he settled into his new office, Eckert discovered that he would not have the same kind of resources Columbia University received from Thomas Watson and IBM. With dismay, he reported, “The funds available for punched card equipment were sufficient to form the nucleus of a scientific computing laboratory for part of the year only.” But Eckert was not a blind partisan of punched card technology, and he knew that there were other ways of producing an almanac, ways that might even prove to be less expensive than the leases for IBM equipment. Borrowing an idea from L. J. Comrie, Eckert adapted a Burroughs accounting machine to act as a difference engine. Once the staff had prepared the initial values for an astronomical table, the accounting machine could compute the rest. Though the Burroughs machine was not intended for scientific calculations, it proved sufficient to the task at hand. By the end of Eckert’s first year in Washington, he could report that “the work of the office as a whole has been advanced two or three months,” even though he did not have the equipment or the staff that he desired.³⁸

37. Wallace Eckert

In June 1940, the Mathematical Tables Project stood as the largest scientific computing organization in the United States, dwarfing the combined staff of the Aberdeen Proving Ground, the American Nautical Almanac, the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau, and the mathematics division of Bell Telephone Laboratories. The WPA computing floor was home to three hundred computers. Half of this group still computed with paper and pencil; the remainder pulled the cranks of old adding machines.³⁹ Another hundred workers checked results, did preparatory calculations, and edited the finished numbers. The group had published six volumes of tables and an equal number of scholarly articles. The planning committee was working on ten volumes more.⁴⁰ Yet the project remained on the fringe of the scientific community. Arnold Lowan could not begin his day, could not open his mail, could not talk with his workers without being reminded that he was running a work relief effort. The WPA dictated the hours he worked, the problems he could undertake, and the laborers he could hire. The label of work relief stuck to him like the dirt of the streets, and no matter how hard he stamped his feet, he could not shake the dust from his boots. “The first requisite of a satisfactory organization of science for war is that it must attract first-rate scientists,” wrote the historian James Phinney Baxter. “One outstanding man will succeed where ten mediocrities will simply fumble.”⁴¹ As the country prepared for war, as R. C. Archibald brought direction and discipline to the Subcommittee on Bibliography of Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation, and as Wallace Eckert acquired difference engines and punched card equipment for the Nautical Almanac staff, Lowan felt a constant pressure to show that his project held at least a few first-rate minds and was not a collection of three hundred unemployable mediocrities.

38. Mathematical Tables Project computers with adding machines

Nothing symbolized professionalism more than the presence of computing equipment, be that equipment punched card tabulators, electric desk calculators, or even the weary Sunstrands. WPA officials were unwilling to grant more machines to the project, even though Arnold Lowan argued that machine-driven calculators would allow him to hire more handicapped workers. A “one armed operator using the new Frieden calculator was able to produce 40% more work than an unimpaired worker using a calculator which is not fully automatic,” read one of his proposals.⁴² WPA officials responded by asking, “Which important tables will have to be abandoned if it is impossible to secure machines?” and then summarily declining the request.⁴³

Lowan was more successful in raising money and acquiring machines when he discovered that he could look beyond the WPA office. Sometime in late 1940 or early 1941, he realized that the Mathematical Tables Project was legally an independent organization that could solicit contracts from any institution, including the project sponsor, the National Bureau of Standards, and the other offices of the United States government. Sensing that there might be an opportunity to do some work for the military, Lowan offered the services of the Mathematical Tables Project to both the army and the navy. He was at first surprised, but ultimately pleased, to discover that both branches of the military employed large computing organizations to support surveyors and the construction of maps.⁴⁴ In the spring of 1941, the army offered Lowan a contract to handle the most repetitious of survey calculations, the preparation of map grids. Map grids reconciled the local geometry of left and right, north and south, with the curvature of the earth. They were particularly useful for field commanders when they looked for sites to place artillery batteries or sought ways to march troops across unmarked land. The army needed such grids for areas that were vulnerable to attack—Alaska, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Caribbean basin—and they were willing to make the Mathematical Tables Project a generous offer if it could do the work quickly. The contract included funds for the purchase of new electrical adding machines and the lease of IBM tabulators. “We greatly appreciate your cooperation in providing this equipment,” wrote Lyman Briggs, who had to approve the final contract. He added that the calculations for the map grids would be “undertaken as soon as the necessary IBM equipment can be obtained.”⁴⁵

The army contract represented a moment of promise at a time when the future of the Mathematical Tables Project had started to grow dim. The WPA, in response to the shift of government funds toward military preparation, was shrinking week by week. In the first six months of 1941, the WPA liquidated half of its assets and released four hundred thousand workers.⁴⁶ Just after Lowan consummated the contract with the army, he received the worrisome news that the WPA was considering closing the Mathematical Tables Project.⁴⁷ No decision had been made, but Lowan tried to stall a closure by requesting that the project be certified as essential for national defense, a status that could be granted only by the secretary of war or the secretary of the navy. The prospects for such certification were not good, as most certified WPA projects were either military construction efforts or salvage teams that were gathering scrap materials from city dumps.⁴⁸

As he had in times past, Lowan turned to Philip Morse of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for assistance. Lowan asked Morse to use whatever influence he might have with the office of the secretary of war. “I wish to point out that if the desired classification as a Certified Defense Project is granted by the War Department,” he wrote, “many of the difficulties under which we are laboring would be obviated.” As an incentive, he pointed out that if they were certified, the computers could finish a large table of interest to Morse and do any other work that he would need for defense projects. Lowan mailed this letter from his home in Brooklyn, not from the Mathematical Tables Project office on Manhattan, and ended the correspondence with the warning, “For obvious reasons, it would be advisable not to mention this letter in your recommendation to the Secretary of War.”⁴⁹

For about a year, Lowan had been conducting a clandestine correspondence with Morse, posting the letters from Brooklyn and asking for replies to his home address. Often these letters were paralleled by official messages that were logged in the WPA correspondence file. In such cases, Lowan would tell Morse, “An office letter of somewhat similar contents will reach you … in due course.”⁵⁰ There was nothing illegal about what they were doing. There was no promise of funds, no exchange of favors, no hints of special treatment. Lowan was merely trying to orchestrate support for his project, though he was trying to do so in a way that appeared free from the very actions he undertook.

About a half dozen scientists received unofficial letters from Lowan, including his former mentor at the Institute for Advanced Study, John von Neumann. Lowan asked von Neumann for a letter of recommendation for the project. He liked to publish such letters as a way of attracting new work. Von Neumann was quick to oblige, but he sent a short and tepid letter, the kind of recommendation that one might pen for a distant and slightly disreputable nephew. Lowan responded immediately to von Neumann, firmly rejecting the letter and asking that it be rewritten. “In its present form, … the phrase ‘To Whom it May Concern’ and the general tone of the statement stamp it as being solicited and, therefore, unsuitable for the purpose for which it was intended, as I stated in my previous letter.” Not trusting von Neumann to write a proper reply, he dictated the form of the new recommendation. “Include in it a personal letter, addressed to me, say, commenting on the program outlined in the April circular, … and perhaps making further suggestions for the computation of new functions of importance in applied mathematics.”⁵¹ Without further comment, von Neumann did as he was bidden.

Lowan never saw any contradictions in his approach to promoting the Mathematical Tables Project. He had been trained as a scientist, a searcher for truth, or at least his best understanding of truth, and yet believed that truth was rarely to be found in the political sphere of this world. At the WPA, he had struggled with contradictory demands: the need to produce accurate mathematical tables and the requirement to employ the greatest number of workers, the goal of keeping a large computing floor busy and a managerial structure that made it difficult to prepare new computing plans for that floor. Five separate offices reviewed Lowan’s computing plans.⁵² Each office could reject plans and require Lowan to rewrite them. During the two and a half years of operation, Lowan had written emergency telegrams to Washington, begging WPA officials to approve his computing plans. On one occasion he had to file a late telegram, warning, “We have only 10 days work for manual computing group.”⁵³

In the fall of 1941, the Mathematical Tables Project moved in a twilight world, without enough support to become a permanent operation and yet not facing the kind of opposition that would result in termination. Most scientists, including those engaged in calculation, simply held no strong opinions about the group. When R. C. Archibald tried to rally the MTAC committee to recommend certification for the Mathematical Tables Project, he discovered that the majority of his committee members would not respond to his calls and letters.⁵⁴ The only strong voice came from Wallace Eckert at the Nautical Almanac. “I am not prepared to certify that the organization should be looked upon as a war necessity whose resources should not be in any wise curtailed,” Eckert wrote. He noted that “many worthy programs are being curtailed and even abandoned.”⁵⁵

The December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor went unremarked in the records of the Mathematical Tables Project. Monday, December 8th, was much like Friday the 5th. There were worksheets to collect, computing plans to check, agreements to make with suppliers. In three quick days, the country was pulled into the war. “There is a lot of fanfare and excitement about the dramatic occasion,” complained the writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, “and yet I feel chiefly a desperate lack of dignity, lack of seriousness, lack of humility about the whole.” Lowan may not have shared Lindbergh’s assessment of public attitudes, but in some way, he shared the plight of her husband, the aviator Charles Lindbergh. In December 1941, Charles Lindbergh had no obvious role in the war effort. Until the attack, he had been an ardent opponent of American intervention, a leader of the “America First” movement. Charles “wants terribly to get to work,” observed his wife, “constructive work—almost with his hands, work in his craft again, have his contribution count—his experience, his technique, his training.”⁵⁶

Like the famous aviator, Lowan desperately wanted to work at his craft, to have his contribution count. Each day he went to work hoping that the notice of defense certification would be lying on the top of his wire in-basket and fearing that the termination letter would be there in its place. Every night, he returned home anticipating a letter of guidance from Phil Morse. A month after the Pearl Harbor attack, Morse urged Lowan to expand his efforts to contact military research laboratories and contractors. There “will have to be built up a technique whereby you can be in more continuous touch with some of the Defense activities,” he wrote, “so that your project can be shifted from time to time as the computation needs change.” He told Lowan to put operations in the hands of his assistant, Gertrude Blanch, and spend his time meeting with the scientists who needed computing services. This kind of work could not be easily done with an “exchange of letters,” Morse explained to Lowan, “but probably should be done by frequent visits to various defense research centers.”⁵⁷

Though Lowan was a vigilant publicist, he was not comfortable with the kind of personal contact that Morse suggested. He preferred to work from his Manhattan office, or his Brooklyn home, and promote the project through letters and fliers. He let Morse serve as the public representative of the project, even though he would have benefited from more contact with the members of the National Defense Research Committee.⁵⁸ In March of 1942, Morse brought the fate of the Mathematical Tables Project to the attention of the National Defense Research Committee and urged the group to place the project under the control of its Division D, the division whose activities included exterior ballistics, bombing trajectories, and the aiming of guns. This last subject, known as “Fire Control,” was developing into a substantial field of mathematical research.⁵⁹ The National Defense Research Committee was willing to take responsibility for the Mathematical Tables Project, but they were thwarted by the project’s relief status. “Congress is exceedingly jealous of its prerogative in laying down the rules according to which government funds may be spent,” reported the committee attorney, and hence “it would be pretty dangerous to attempt [to take control of the Mathematical Tables Project] pending further study of the situation.”⁶⁰ Accepting this recommendation, the National Defense Research Committee left Lowan with no secure future.

Defense certification came quite unexpectedly to the Mathematical Tables Project in April 1942, but it offered no special status, as almost all of the surviving WPA projects were considered vital to the war.⁶¹ The New York office of the WPA informed Lowan that they were “interested in the work proposed for the coming year” and that they could only support the Mathematical Tables Project “provided workers are available.”⁶² The deserving poor were increasingly scarce as unemployment fell and WPA workers abandoned the relief projects for better-paying jobs in war industries. The Mathematical Tables Project lost several junior members of its planning committee to local manufacturers. Lowan was able to staunch the flight of these workers by transferring the entire planning committee to the payroll of the National Bureau of Standards and offering them competitive salaries.⁶³ He was less successful on another problem, the departure of his IBM equipment. The army notified Lowan that they were canceling their contract for map computations and reclaiming the tabulator, the card punches, and the sorters. They could no longer provide resources to a relief project, they explained, for “only our Civil Service employees will be used to operate these machines.”⁶⁴

The defense certification did little to strengthen the position of the Mathematical Tables Project, and it raised a new issue that threatened the organization’s survival. Shortly after the secretary of the army signed the certification order, he instructed Arnold Lowan and Gertrude Blanch to apply for Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) security clearances.⁶⁵ In theory, the entire staff would have to be cleared in order to accept defense projects, but the first step was to ensure that the leaders were approved. Lowan and Blanch dutifully complied with the request only to have their applications placed in a security limbo, neither accepted nor rejected. We do not know the doubts that the FBI harbored about Lowan, but we do know that they believed that Blanch was excessively liberal and sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The evidence was circumstantial, but according to FBI analysts, it accumulated into a compelling case. The FBI reported that Blanch had been seen purchasing the American Worker, communist newspaper; that she was a registered member of the American Labor Party, which openly sympathized with communists; and that she had signed campaign petitions for communist political candidates. Unknown to her, the WPA had identified her as “potentially disloyal,” a claim of hearsay that was as impossible to refute as it was to prove. The most damning evidence against Blanch was her sister, Fanny, with whom she shared an apartment. Fanny freely acknowledged that she was a registered member of the Communist Party and actively recruited new members for the organization.⁶⁶

At the time, the Soviet Union was an ally of the United States against Germany, but that was of little matter. The Russian revolution and the Soviet claims of world domination had frightened many in the West. Liberal thinkers argued that the communists would eventually move into the comfortable ranks of the middle class and drop their aggressive ways, but there was little evidence of this in 1941. The Soviet Union was actively spying on its ally, spiriting scientific information back to Moscow in diplomatic pouches and air flights over Alaska. At one point, a Soviet engineer had approached the Columbia Astronomical Computing Bureau and asked for “permission to visit your laboratory in order to receive some information as regards organization and method [sic] used there.” The request came through Amtorg, the notorious trading company that served as a cover for Soviet spies. The new director of the laboratory forwarded the request to his predecessor, Wallace Eckert. Eckert told the Amtorg official that the Columbia laboratory was open to all but then recounted the story of Boris Numerov, who had visited the laboratory four years before and had subsequently disappeared. “I sincerely hope that his interest in machines was not construed by his government as treason,” Eckert wrote. “I am shivering a little bit,” wrote the new director after the exchange. “I would not be surprised if I wouldn’t hear from them at all, and frankly I just as soon would not.”⁶⁷

The Mathematical Tables Project never had any visit from Amtorg or any other known Soviet agency, but the label of “untrustworthy” joined that of “work relief” in the public image of the project. Gertrude Blanch and Arnold Lowan tried to compensate for their lack of security clearances by taking a public loyalty oath and soliciting testimonial letters from friends and supporters, including the faithful Philip Morse.⁶⁸ These actions did nothing to improve the reputation of the Mathematical Tables Project, as Blanch and Lowan discovered when they were asked to prepare tables for the LORAN project.

LORAN, an acronym for Long-Range navigation, was a joint project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bell Telephone Laboratories. It used pairs of special radio stations to guide ships and planes. The two stations would be separated by tens or hundreds of miles, yet they would exchange a special synchronized signal, a little blip that flew back and forth from one station to the other like an electronic tennis ball flying through the ether. Navigators would determine their position by timing the arrival of these electronic blips. From one pair of times, they could determine that their plane or ship was located somewhere on a curved path. If they conducted this operation twice, using two different pairs of stations, they would be able to construct two curves that intersected at the exact point of their position.

MIT engineers demonstrated the LORAN system in June 1942. They used a single pair of radio stations, one located on the tip of Long Island and the other housed in an old Coast Guard Station on the Delaware shore. They placed a LORAN receiver on a navy airship, taught the navigator how to perform the special calculations, and released the craft at Atlantic City. The airship meandered up and down the coastline, going nowhere in particular but giving the navigator a chance to do the arithmetic.⁶⁹ When the craft returned to its base, the scientific staff declared the experiment a success, even though the navigator was able to do only one-half of the calculations. “We are ready to begin the computations necessary for the production of [navigation] charts,” wrote one of the engineers, but he noted that the navy “cannot now take on the routine but voluminous calculations required.” The Bureau of Navigation, which included the Nautical Almanac Office, did not have enough staff to prepare the tables, and there was no other large computing office within the service. Through Phil Morse, the LORAN engineers learned about the Mathematical Tables Project. “This group would gladly undertake the calculations,” commented one engineer, “but they already have a number of other jobs progressing.”⁷⁰

Arnold Lowan was pleased to put aside other jobs for the LORAN work. He assigned the navigation calculations to a small team of computers led by Milton Abramowitz (1913–1958), the longest-serving staff member at the Mathematical Tables Project. Lowan had recruited Abramowitz in 1937, when he was a young graduate student at Brooklyn College. When Blanch had come for her initial inspection of the Mathematical Tables Project office, Abramowitz had been working alone at an old table in the big, empty computing room. In the first years of operation, he was the staff sergeant, the floor leader of the group. As he gained experience and completed his graduate studies, he advanced through the project ranks. He led the special computing group, became a key member of the planning committee, and, during the year of army map grid calculations, took command of the project’s punched card equipment.

The MIT engineers estimated that “the services of about a dozen of the better computers would be satisfactory” to prepare the tables, but that was not enough.⁷¹ When Abramowitz prepared a sample table, he would regularly appear at Lowan’s desk, inquire after the director’s health, and politely request an additional computer. Lowan, who spoke with a heavy Romanian accent, would complain that he did not have enough computers to fulfill important requests from the army and navy, but in the end he would give Abramowitz the additional worker. By the early fall, Lowan had lost so many computers to LORAN, or to other projects, that he was no longer able to take new assignments. Looking for a way to strengthen his computing staff, he requested that ten of his computers be allowed to work forty hours per week instead of the thirty-two hours mandated by WPA regulations.⁷² The New York City WPA office denied the petition, stating that the “Emergency Relief act is intended to furnish temporary work for needy people. It is supposed to encourage workers to gain private employment.”⁷³

With a shrinking staff and no dispensation to work a full forty hours, the Mathematical Tables Project struggled ahead as best it could. The members of the planning committee accepted some of the extra work, spending their evenings on the computing floor, finishing the calculations, going over results, trying to get the most from their staff. Their efforts were complicated when Lowan received an urgent letter from Phil Morse that raised the issue of security. “I hope,” he wrote, “you have arrangements whereby you are certain that the results of the calculations do not leak out to the outside world without your control.”⁷⁴ Lowan assured him that human computers had access only to intermediate calculations and that the senior staff had control of the final results. The reason for Morse’s concern soon appeared. In early November, the Mathematical Tables Project completed the sample navigation table for the LORAN project after devoting 5,000 hours of computation to the task.⁷⁵ The table was reviewed by MIT engineers, who judged the result “very satisfactory” and recommended that the project be given a contract to prepare all of the tables. The navy acknowledged the recommendation but after considering the issues involved, concluded that they would look for some other group to do the calculations. “This decision was based on the security aspects of our work,” wrote one engineer, “and was made by Naval Operations.”⁷⁶

On December 3, less than two weeks after the LORAN decision, President Franklin Roosevelt announced that the WPA would be terminated and all the projects liquidated. Under the termination plan, the Mathematical Tables Project would operate through March 1943 in order to consolidate its accomplishments and end its activity gracefully. For Arnold Lowan, the news was a blow to the chest, a painful way to end four years of dedicated work. The phrase used by Roosevelt to describe the closure, “honorably discharged,” stung with irony, for Lowan wanted nothing more than to contribute his bit to military research. He was not ready to concede that his computing lab would have to die the death of a relief project, so one more time he returned home to Brooklyn, placed a sheet of paper on his table, and wrote to Philip Morse, “I would welcome any suggestions you may have.”⁷⁷

When the other members of the Mathematical Tables Project reflected upon the difficult days in late 1942, they liked to believe that L. J. Comrie had saved their jobs. According to Ida Rhodes, L. J. Comrie was listening to the radio on the night of December 3 and heard the news that the WPA would be terminated. “Not bothering to affix his wooden leg, he hopped to the nearest telegraph office and sent a ‘hot wire’ to President Roosevelt, stating that under no circumstances must the Math Tables Project be allowed to perish—adding some choice language about boondoggling in other projects.” Upon receiving this telegram, as Rhodes told the story, Roosevelt was supposed to have ordered an investigation. A government inspector, a young woman in a uniform, was immediately dispatched to New York. She called upon the project, reviewed its accomplishments, and recommended that the National Defense Research Council take responsibility for the group. Her opinion carried weight in the highest offices of government, and so the project was saved.⁷⁸

There is some evidence to support Rhodes’s story. Comrie did hear a radio broadcast on December 3 and, a few days later, sent a telegram to President Roosevelt. The message was free of “choice language about boondoogling” but said simply: “British scientists engaged on war work hope you will provide for continued activity of New York Work Projects Administration Mathematical Tables Project.”⁷⁹ There is no comment on the artificial leg and no record that the telegram made it from Roosevelt to the office of the WPA. There was too large a gap between the responsibilities of the president and the little project that Lowan oversaw. Furthermore, Comrie had no standing with the government of the United States. He had only limited affiliation with American scientific institutions and commanded no American votes. Even if the telegram had reached the WPA office and been entered into its communication log, the program officers would have recognized that Comrie had written several times to the agency and that his last letter had not been so complimentary. Only six month before, Comrie had complained that the computation of the Mathematical Tables Project “seems to me extravagant, and to savour of computing gone amok.”⁸⁰ Comrie’s December telegram reached the Mathematical Tables Project only because Comrie sent a copy of it to Arnold Lowan and Lowan distributed copies of the message to all of his supporters.⁸¹

In fact, when Comrie sent his urgent telegram, two efforts were under way to commandeer the project for military work. The first came from the navy, which had discovered that there were no other large computing laboratories in the United States that were prepared to handle LORAN computations. The woman Rhodes recalls visiting the project was likely Regina Schlachter, a lieutenant (junior grade) attached to the navy’s Hydrographic Office. Schlachter visited the Mathematical Tables Project one month before Comrie sent his telegram to Roosevelt. Schlachter examined the operations of the project, determined that the calculations could be secured, and recommended that the navy claim the services of one mathematician, Milton Abramowitz, sixty calculating machines, ten typists, and forty-nine computers.⁸²

With the resources of the Mathematical Tables Project, Lt. Schlachter organized a new computing office, named the New York Hydrographic Project. She found space for the group at the Hudson Terminal Building, a complex of offices in Lower Manhattan that was later redeveloped into the World Trade Center. Workers from the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard cleared the rooms, reinforced the doors, and installed a safe. At the request of the navy, Lt. Schlachter installed a twenty-four-hour guard at the facility. She deferred all mathematical questions to Abramowitz, who was assisted by an MIT professor with a reserve commission.⁸³

The hydrographic computers were a small cross section of New York’s population. There were twenty-six men and twenty-three women. The group included a Weinberg, a Sinclair, a Nabokov, an O’Brien, a Dalrimple, and a Cordova. Some of the computers came from Brooklyn, some from the Bronx, and a few from the neighborhood of Harlem. The navy made no attempt to investigate the loyalty of these workers. Instead, it tried to isolate the computers and prevent them from having access to the final tables. The computing sheets made no reference to LORAN or navigation. There was no indication of time, of radio frequencies, or even of longitude and latitude. When computers resigned, the navy tended to replace them with the wives of servicemen, reasoning that women with a personal stake in the success of the military would be unlikely to betray the office.⁸⁴

The actions of the navy were matched by a decision from the National Defense Research Committee. In the fall of 1942, the committee was in the middle of a major reorganization, which expanded the number of divisions. During this effort, the committee created a new division called the Applied Mathematics Panel and put this group under the leadership of Rockefeller Foundation mathematician Warren Weaver.⁸⁵ This panel was the offspring of the division devoted to fire control, a division that was also led by Weaver. Weaver had argued for the Applied Mathematics Panel because “the demands to carry out analytical studies kept increasing rapidly”⁸⁶ and because, without it, new devices could not be designed, tested, manufactured, and deployed “in time to affect the conduct of the war.”⁸⁷ In general, the “analytical studies” were expansions of ballistics work, “the mathematical analysis of certain fundamental problems.”⁸⁸ These studies developed mathematical models for bombing runs, antiaircraft fire, shock wave propagation, and other aspects of weapons operations.

Weaver recruited Thornton Fry of Bell Telephone Laboratories to be the vice-chair of the committee and asked Oswald Veblen to bring his experience from the First World War. In all, about ten mathematicians served on the Applied Mathematics Panel, including Princeton professors S. S. Wilks (1906–1964) and Marston Morse (1892–1977) and New York University mathematician Richard Courant (1888–1972). For a time, the brother of Oswald Veblen’s First World War colleague Forest Ray Moulton served as staff to the committee.⁸⁹ At the first meeting of the panel in January 1943, Weaver opened the discussions by identifying computing as “a large and important need” and argued that the work of the panel would “doubtless involve several broad contracts with groups such as the Lowan WPA Computing Group, the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau, the Computing Center at MIT, etc.”⁹⁰

The Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau was the new name for Wallace Eckert’s old laboratory at Columbia. The Computing Center at MIT was a small group of computers working directly with Phil Morse.⁹¹ As both of these organizations were university research labs, they were obvious candidates for Applied Mathematics Panel contracts. The Mathematical Tables Project was more problematic. Weaver told the first meeting of the panel that he had met with Arnold Lowan and Gertrude Blanch in mid-November, three full weeks before the WPA announced its liquidation. He reported that it was a good discussion and that he came away from the meeting with a better understanding of how the group operated and the kind of work it was able to do. He wanted the panel to take control of the project, though he admitted that no “significant fraction of the group could be cleared” and that the computers would have to be limited to “work of such a general character that could be unclassified.”⁹²

Among the members of the Applied Mathematics Panel, only Warren Weaver was interested in taking responsibility for the Mathematical Tables Project. Weaver went looking for more support by polling the leaders of the National Defense Research Committee divisions to see if they might make use of a large computing office. On January 14, he sent a mimeographed letter to the nineteen leaders and waited for the replies. In less than two weeks, he had four votes in favor of the Mathematical Tables Project and fifteen votes against. As he reviewed the comments from the different divisions, Weaver decided to ignore the poll and his own concerns about security. “Of my own knowledge,” he told the Applied Mathematics Panel, “I can say that if Dr. Lowan’s group were disbanded, another group of several dozen computers (at least) would have to be set up in NDRC somewhere to take care of the calculations which Dr. Lowan is at present carrying on for various sections of the NDRC.”⁹³

For a time, Weaver went looking for an alternative to the Mathematical Tables Project, a computing office that had no history of work relief and no baggage of security problems, but there was no organization with a similar expertise in scientific computation. “I hear that you have considerable computing machines at Vassar [College] and that you have some experience with them,” he wrote to a mathematics professor named Grace Hopper (1906–1992). “Are you interested in doing work for the Applied Mathematics Panel?”⁹⁴ Hopper was available for the work, but she was hoping to win a commission with the navy. The navy was resisting her overtures, claiming that she was too old, at the age of thirty-six, and was underweight. Undaunted, Hopper persisted and finally received her commission. The navy assigned her to Howard Aiken’s computing facility at Harvard, which handled a variety of calculations for weapons and communications research.⁹⁵

Unable to find any alternative to the Mathematical Tables Project, Weaver began to bring the group under the control of the Applied Mathematics Panel and was surprised to discover that Arnold Lowan was circulating his own plan for the project. Lowan proposed two options to the Applied Mathematics Panel. The first would establish a group of six mathematicians and fifty computers; the second would keep the same number of mathematicians but retain only twenty-five computers. When asked about the plan, Weaver confessed that he was “just a little embarrassed by this whole situation.” He had no direction from the National Defense Research Committee, and “my only information concerning the budgetary possibilities is contained in an estimate which I believe Dr. Lowan prepared … and a copy reached me by an indirect route.” After studying the document, Weaver decided to accept the smaller of the two plans. With a single letter, he swept away all the restrictions of the WPA and most of the stigma of work relief. The Mathematical Tables Project would be a contractor to the Applied Mathematics Panel. It would operate as an office of the National Bureau of Standards, though Lowan would take his orders from the panel. The agenda for the group was no longer set by a New Deal agency in Washington but by a committee of well-respected mathematicians.⁹⁶

Even though Arnold Lowan would have to sacrifice seventy-five computers, he was pleased with the offer from the Applied Mathematics Panel and told Philip Morse that this “very satisfactory arrangement is unquestionably due to a great extent to your constant efforts on our behalf, for which please accept the expression of our warm gratitude.”⁹⁷ Lowan had about two weeks to finish his obligations to the WPA and prepare for his new assignment. March 15 was the last day of operation as a relief project. The computers packed their equipment, burned old computing sheets, and disposed of the posters that had guided them. As the Mathematical Tables Project shed the seventy-five computers, it also shed the manual computing division. When the project opened its new office, all computers would use adding machines or mechanical calculators.⁹⁸ Ida Rhodes would identify this move as the time that “life began,”⁹⁹ the moment when the Mathematical Tables Project finally dropped the trappings of work relief and become a professional computing organization.