Herbert R.J. Grosch
ISBN 0-88733-085-1
Copyright © 1991, 2003, by Herbert R.J. Grosch
First edition book design by Ted Pedersen
All Rights Reserved
THIRD EDITION
For Mabel and Dorothy and Elizabeth and Joyce
—and especially for Nancy
[ Contents ] [ Chapter 01 ] [ Chronology ] [ Index ] [ Biography ]
Computer: Bit Slices from a Life was converted to HTML for the Web by Frank da Cruz in May 2003 for the Columbia University Computing History Project with permission and collaboration of Dr. Grosch. This is a manuscript of the 3rd edition, a work in progress sponsored by the US National Science Foundation. The first edition was published by Third Millenium Books, Novato, California, in 1991 and as noted below, copyright was reassigned to the author upon breakup of that company. As to conditions for use, Dr. Grosch says "make sure it's as generous as possible. The only restriction I really want is, no alterations, or elisions which change [my] intentions." To this I would add that the definitive, complete, and up-to-date Web copy of this work is to be found in the following location; copies at other sites might be dated, incomplete, or altered:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/computer.html
This is a simple, monolothic, and validated HTML file, 1.7MB in size, representing over 500 printed pages, self-contained, fully searchable, and displayable by any browser. The only cautions for viewing, other than sheer size, are the presence of several tables, which browsers such as Lynx might not format correctly, and the fact that it contains a fair number of words in German, French, and other languages containing accented characters, coded in ISO 8859-1 Latin Alphabet 1, properly announced.
The Index (which applies only through Chapter 25) is fully linked, and page anchors have been added through the end of Chapter 25, and correspond to the printed pages of the first edition (which has 24 chapters and no index). Page numbers appear inline, representing the beginning of the corresponding printed page, as [-xx-] (in red if your browser and computer permit), where xx is the page number. You can search for any particular page (through 270) using this format. New chapters will be added as they arrive.
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[not yet finalized]
—Las Vegas, Nevada [2003]
EIGHT YEARS AGO I sent the first 23 chapters of COMPUTER to press. I wanted to go on; I had toured Europe in the early Sixties, and had other stories from those days that historians and veterans would want to hear. But as I began again, a family tragedy intervened, and I set the work aside.
When I returned to the United States I brought with me the remains of my huge original archive: my 1962 call reports to Control Data, my flight logs, my appointment (and hotel/restaurant) lists, some of my expense account carbons. Cautiously I began to reconstruct what had happened to me and to the burgeoning world of computers from mid-1959 on. It went slowly.
Then I was awarded a National Science Foundation grant. It was to me as an individual investigator (unusual), and it permitted me to move from New Mexico to Washington, where I had the resources of the Library of Congress and of the Smithsonian within walking distance. The publishers of the first edition had broken up, and courteously relinquished the copyright. I decided to continue the material more or less seamlessly, and to call the result a second edition of COMPUTER rather than a separate book.
What follows is the result. There are no pictures this time, although I have many more to display. The pagination of the bound volume is preserved. Errors that I am aware of in the first edition have been corrected, although I am sure there are others, and not a few in the new material. The table of contents and the chronology have been extended. And at the very end I have appended the index to the first 23 chapters, which Underwood-Miller did not print.
Providing this edition on CD/ROM, uncoded and uncompressed, means that chapters or sections of the book can be downloaded and subjected to full-text search. This is a poor substitute for a careful index, and I apologize. If I ever complete the 1967-87 years, which is possible but not too likely, I will then undertake a full index.
In a few months Y2K will be upon us. To look back from that cusp to a younger and happier time, when anything seemed possible and the world of computing was just opening out, is a great privilege, and a very great pleasure.
—Washington, D.C. [1999]
THIS BOOK was to be an autobiography. I was made into a computer fifty years ago. I was the second scientist ever hired by IBM, and I watched the Watsons on Olympus, and Bill Norris and Ken Olsen and Gene Amdahl, and a thousand great commercial and academic figures. Later, for three amusing years, I was the top Federal computer honcho, and escaped to be editor of the major trade newspaper. I was a charter member of the world's first and largest professional computer society, and the first national president ever elected by membership petition. I worked in Monaco and Switzerland and the Netherlands when I was too controversial to be employable in the U.S., and I consulted for the largest and best Japanese computer company.
And I had four wonderful wives, and a hundred lovely supporters, and terrific friends on five continents - and some very lively enemies. Perhaps I could do for the computer trade what Casanova did for Venetian diplomacy? Only problem was, his story ran to twelve volumes!
Or I could do a history: a history of the computer times I had lived through. I had mountains of books and papers and clippings to help me crosscheck against the increasingly divergent recollections of others, and could certainly make a useful contribution to the unfolding story of that intelligence amplifier everybody now calls the computer. Well, it looked like a lot of work, and not much fun for me or for the readers.
For a while I thought about doing an ALICE. Lewis Carroll is a favorite preceptor for just about everybody in the computer wonderland, and the thought of Watson Senior shouting "Off with her head!" at every married IBM woman [1948] was very appealing. I could see myself saying "Good-bye, feet!" as I grew into a manager - oh, the parallels were evocative. But I had to admit the idea was pretty far-fetched.
Then I wondered about PLAYER PIANO. Kurt Vonnegut did his satire on automation so well; I had gone to GE's Association Island [1955] and had sat under the elm that was transformed into a ruined oak at the end of his yarn. As Schenectady became Ilion, so could Endicott become, say, Watsonville, and the shoe workers could parade past the IBM factory shouting "While you're thinking, we're drinking!" just as they had in real life. But the themes would have to be spare, or the satire would be blunted. What I wanted to do was to weave an exceedingly rich and complex fabric, with a warp of computer history but a filling, a woof, of wives and friends and travels. No, Vonnegut didn't look much easier than Carroll.
Think of my magnificently complicated life as a huge multi-dimensional data bank. The totality is the autobiography - millions and millions of bytes. Slice it along the time axis and you have histories: big computers, software, the evolution of standards. Slice it another way and you have applications: science, or banking, or air defense; another, and you have organizations. What I have finally chosen to do is to slice it so as to feature wonderful people: some of them famous, like the great Vons - von Braun, von Karman, von Neumann; some of them tremendously significant but not so well known, like L.J. Comrie and Wallace Eckert; some of them just vivid and exciting, and important to me because they were wonderfully human if not historic.
[-ix-] I aspire to Magic Realism - a picture somewhat larger and much clearer than life. But let me reassure readers, and future thesis perpetrators: I have not given "...to airy nothing/ A local habitation and a name." All the things in my stories actually happened. The Old Man really did order the support columns removed from the SSEC room. The television link between the jet engine test cells in Lynn and the GE 704 really did click only a few moments before the generals and the airline presidents arrived. Tom Junior really did walk through the sacred halls of Armonk carrying a whisky carton, and with a duck in it!
I have not sharpened the joys and the sorrows; there was genuine gold and genuine guilt. And when I praise Grace Hopper and Gerhard Neumann, or criticize Vin Learson, it is from the heart. I lived in vivid times.
Finally, there is no point to disclaimers. The characters in my story are real, every one of them. Some are not identified precisely. That is not an accident. And some, some of the best ones like Comrie and Watson Senior and Wallie Eckert, have gone beyond my praise. As with all the others, wives and lovers and pets, friends and enemies and quizzical bystanders, I've drawn them as I remember them, with no fear and much, much favor.
—Mies, Switzerland [1991]
In Chapter 01 you will encounter
(in order of appearance):
Watson Senior [Thomas J. Watson] the Imperial Presence
IBM [International Business Machines Corporation] the empire
The SSEC [Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator] 12,000 tubes
Betsy Stewart mistress of the SSEC console
The ENIAC [Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator] 18,000 tubes
The ASCC [Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator] first of the giants
Wallace Eckert first scientist ever hired by IBM
John McPherson IBM engineering director
Pete Luhn inventor of relay calculators and much else
Pres Eckert [no relation to Wallace] builder of the ENIAC
John Mauchly designer of the ENIAC
Howard Aiken he upstaged Watson Senior at the ASCC dedication
Grace Hopper everybody's favorite naval person, and mother of COBOL
The Watson Lab [Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory] at Columbia
Rex Seeber master of the SSEC
Hilleth Thomas mathematical physicist
The NORC [Navy Ordnance Research Calculator] first supercomputer
Frank Hamilton builder of the SSEC
George Richter Gray Eminence of IBM deliveries
L.J. Comrie [Leslie John Comrie] great English table-maker and computer
Becky Jones the Moon on a Friden
John Backus father of FORTRAN
FORTRAN [FORmula TRANslation] longlived technical computer language
Ted Codd lawgiver of relational data bases
Richard Courant famous NYU mathematician
I.I. Rabi top physicist at Columbia
Dwayne Orton editor of THINK
THINK Magazine IBM prestige publication
Dorothy [Dorothy Carlson Grosch] Mount Wilson's loss was my gain
The Waldorf Astoria Hotel scene of many IBM parties
NOTE: In later lists, there will be entries without comments. Instead, I give the number of the chapter where that entity was first introduced.
[-1-] He would be 74 next month, although no one in IBM dared to mention the number to him. The family, the large and devoted family, would of course celebrate - very privately, and without emphasizing his age. In his sharp but nevertheless sentimental way he was looking forward to the dedication next week as a major present - a recognition by devoted employees of his foresight, his vigor, his determination to make "the IBM", as he called his empire, an even more important leader in American and world business.
This was Thomas John Watson, "Mr. Watson" when addressed directly, "T.J." in most third-person mentions inside the company and nearby, "The Old Man" informally and pejoratively. The use of "Watson Senior", to distinguish the emperor from the heir apparent, would not be in frequent use for another five or six years; indeed, it was really a coined label for the convenience of media people and historians rather than something used in IBM.
It was Thursday, January 22, 1948. Watson and his entourage stood inside the world's second giant electronic calculator (we say "computer" today, but more about that a little later). Three months ago the space had contained The French Bootery, a handsome and quite successful shoe shop catering to 57th Street ladies and would-be ladies. From the ground floor of the building adjoining IBM World Headquarters, a building owned or at least controlled by IBM, the Bootery had been summarily moved across the street - these things were much easier in 1947 - and the cavern remaining had been miraculously transformed, with walls of plate glass and stainless steel shielding some 12,000 full-sized vacuum tubes and 20,000 special relays: the SSEC.
Watson, his vice presidents and sycophants, and senior technical people nervously awaiting judgement, were clustered around the free-standing units on the raised floor of the lovely room. A little further back, a gaggle of less senior engineers and scientists was tensely watching the action, available to answer questions or open and close panels and doors. The giant control unit [-2-] covered with hundreds of identical but handsomely labeled switches, was "manned" by Betsy Stewart, appearing quite at ease and in command of the situation. Behind her were attractively cased line printers, and fairly close were repackaged punched card readers and gang punches, and some special units.
Questions, many questions, and answers; none about money, for T.J. assumed that others were seeing to it that enough had been provided and none wasted. Not much about the press; T.J. knew that they would flock when he beckoned. Would the demonstration impress the important men and women who had been invited for the dedication? Would the IBM creation outshine the ENIAC? How would it compare to the machine Mr. Watson had donated to ungrateful Harvard, back before electronics?
There was a pause. Those of us away from the center of Watsonian attention, standing near the inscription which offered the huge device to Science - over the famous Watson signature, of course - began to relax a bit. T.J. had not appeared to notice that the machine was not doing anything important, although those of us who had been close to him on other occasions could not be sure. He had eyes in the back of his head, and the memory of an elephant. True, he was not supposed to understand much about electronics - on the other hand, somebody had supported a good deal of experimentation before the war, and was authorizing the hiring of bright young guys from the radar shops of MIT. The recent upsurge, including the giant machine we stood inside of, was arguably the brainchild of Wallace Eckert and John McPherson. But the pre-war patents, now embodied inside the walls of the new calculator, had been funded by The Old Man.
Anyhow, no embarrassing comments. He assumed everything would be ready by next Tuesday - after all, he had ordered that it be so. We were not so sure, but we were all committed, seniors and juniors alike.
The emperor looked around one last time. The whole session, although vitally important to the fantastic future of IBM, had taken less than an hour. "A great credit to the IBM," he said, and all the vice presidential heads nodded in unison. "Science will move ahead more rapidly. Our universities and our government will surely benefit, and world peace and world trade will be fostered as people from other countries visit and perhaps use the calculator."
"There is just one thing," he said somewhat off-handedly. "The sweep of this room is hindered by those large black columns down the center. Have them removed before the ceremony." And out he marched, tailed by his quivering followers!
Well, we had four days, counting the weekend. Also - slight complication - those columns concealed the steel uprights that held up the twenty-story building. Even for Mr. Watson, no one could remove them. Now, that elephant memory was selective. Later that year I watched him order one of his cleverest inventors, Pete Luhn, to build terminals and connect them to a big relay calculator "on a lower floor", so that the "research area" would be more attractive - not bad, in 1948, and from a 74-year-old! I asked Pete later what he would do. Would he propose a hundred-man effort, abandon his current projects, and set out after The Old Man's casual dream?
"No," said he, "he'll never mention it again unless I bring it up. Of course, [-3-] if he gets mad at me about something else, even ten years from now, he'll remember he told me to do it - and that I didn't. And tell everybody nearby I disobeyed a direct order."
The cooler heads assumed that T.J. would forget the whole thing. Cynics like me figured he just wanted to keep the troops on their toes; he knew very well those columns held the building up. On the other hand, non-tech types who had watched the old boy in action reminded us newcomers that he might use noncompliance as an excuse to erase some poor soul who had "failed" him before, perhaps - looking hard at me - by omitting to invite someone to one of Mr. Watson's celebrations (I had just done the scientific invitations for the dedication).
Inspiration! Wasn't mine; I seem to remember a chap named Macnamara, who was doing the goodies: programs and table favors and souvenirs for the luncheon, and discreet corsages for the two or three lady guests. There was to be a fancy four-color brochure about the machine, and it was to feature a big centerfold view of the main area. We junked the whole stack (how I now wish I had had a copy!) and, over a frantic weekend, printed a revised edition. Alas, it had to be in sepia; even for IBM the colored option was out of the question. The centerfold photograph was carefully retouched, and all traces of the offending columns were removed.
I loved it; the semantics boys were right - there is Reality, and then there are representations of reality, and layer upon layer of more remote imagery. The columns were still there on opening day, and they stayed there for the life of the machine, and on into the golden days when a 701 lived there. A major Saturday Evening Post story published later in the year has a fine colored illustration of the area, with the columns front and center. But the history books show a beautiful room without columns - the room Watson ordered!
What was I doing in the back of that room, and why had I been the one to work up the scientific invitation list for the unveiling of the SSEC, the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator? It was the third giant machine of the Babbage line, and like the first, the ill-fated Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator which Watson had had built to Howard Aiken's specifications four years before, it was to be dedicated to the greater glory of Science and - unlike the ASCC, now universally called the Harvard Mark I - to the glory also of the International Business Machines Corporation. The second giant, and the first to use primitive Forties electronics, had been the ENIAC, cobbled together by Pres Eckert and John Mauchly in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania, in dumb downtown Philadelphia.
ENIAC added nothing at all to IBM prestige, although the builders had reluctantly been forced to use IBM gang punches as input/output devices. What it had done, by appearing on the front page of the New York Times - the first such device ever to do so - was to make The Old Man grind his teeth so ferociously that people, dozens of people, shivered as far away as Endicott, home of the IBM "research" laboratory.
I was the second scientist ever to be hired by IBM, and an anomaly in a dozen other ways. In later chapters I'll tell the details of how it happened; the important points are that I had been a computer since the autumn of 1935, [-4-] was an authentic member of the same tribe of scientists as Wallace Eckert, and had responded instantly to the announcement in SCIENCE that he, Eckert - no relation to Pres Eckert, by the way - had been hired in March 1945 to head a new Department of Pure Science in IBM, and to establish the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University.
Remember the name ENIAC? That acronym stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator. Almost every current article about that incredible machine, with its 18,000 highly-fallible vacuum tubes, and the thousandfold increase in speed it brought to major calculations, says "Computer". But it wasn't so; from the mid-Nineteenth century until about 1952, a computer was a human being who did computations (and associated technical tasks in laboratories and observatories). He - or more often, she (I married one) - used printed math tables and calculating devices. The people who didn't do it full time, or who used slide rules and planimeters and such, usually didn't use the label. I did, and was quite proud to have been made a computer by a more experienced member of the clan, in the mid-Thirties. All the Cs in ENIAC and EDVAC and EDSAC and UNIVAC stood for Calculator, which is what we computers used, along with Marchants and Fridens and Monroes and Brunsvigas, until the Defense Calculator became the IBM Type 701.
Eckert hired me in May of 1945, and the Watson Lab had been under way for some months - and both the European and the Pacific wars deliriously concluded - before the ENIAC announcement. Although I had been busy shaping up and running the computing side of the enterprise, I had helped Wallace interview his second senior employee, a relieved refugee from Howard Aiken's sweat shop. He was one of the two or three people in the whole world who had managed a giant machine, the one at Harvard. Aiken, the irascible boss, and Grace Hopper, nowadays everybody's favorite computer person but then known principally as the co-author of the handsome Harvard Mark I operating manual, were his only counterparts.
Eckert wanted Rex - Robert R. Seeber - because he expected to build another giant. Watson had told him IBM intended to do so, and had indicated vigorously how unhappy he was with Aiken and Harvard. Now, Eckert had good lines into MIT, and although not himself at ease with even old-fashioned electronics, knew that the new radar techniques developed so quickly there (and in Britain, and at the Bell Labs, neither of which were readily accessible to Watson and his business-machines-oriented crew) would be the building blocks of future calculators.
In parallel to his recruiting Seeber, and IBM's third scientist, Hilleth Thomas of Thomas-Fermi statistics fame, Eckert set out to pick up three or four youngsters, hot off the radar griddle, to work on long range projects at the Watson Lab rather than in IBM shops in Endicott and Poughkeepsie. He was not at all an empire builder - it would have been good for IBM, and certainly for me, if he had been. He simply planned to stockpile some advanced technology against the time when Mr. Watson might need it. When ENIAC hit the front pages, he was ready with Seeber, but the pulse-electronics boys were not tuned up, and the SSEC had to be built with big bottles and old circuits. Out of that tiny specialized group finally came NORC, the Naval [-5-] Ordnance Research Calculator - the very first supercomputer. It just took a while!
Watson pushed the "start" button. He picked Frank Hamilton, who had been Number Two on the ASCC. "Put every IBM resource to work, Mr. Hamilton. I want the new machine to be faster than that one in Pennsylvania, more capable than the one we gave to Harvard. I want it to be installed here at World Headquarters, in one year. And I want it to be available to the scientific world, not hidden away at a selfish university or at a military installation."
Frank realized how horrendous the task would be. But he was a big, handsome, forceful engineer - a natural leader, with a team in place in the Endicott laboratories and a clear idea of what other projects he could dip into. It was a great challenge. Besides, you did not say no to the boss - not when he gave you an, ahem, opportunity like that.
Although I did not yet see it clearly, this was my first exposure to the IBM Contract. During good behavior, you had a life job, at non-decreasing pay, and with great perquisites, ranging from membership in lovely dollar-a-year country clubs to suites on the Queen Mary, provided:
Good behavior included not growing hair on your face, not wearing colored shirts, not taking a drink in public (one very senior executive, who frequently occupied those Queen Mary suites, was to die two years later from a hobnailed liver), and never contradicting The Old Man or his direct representatives. I did all four in my first two years in the company, and for a while lived to tell the tale. What got to me in the end was c); I kissed the whip very poorly indeed.
Hamilton and Eckert and Seeber settled the specs in just a few days. There had been a series of memos and meetings in 1945, and not just desultory ones. John McPherson, then Director of Engineering and approximately Eckert's boss, had made heavy contributions - intellectual and technical ones, not managerial; you will see much more of him in later chapters. The old-timers who had built the Harvard machine and who held the primitive but valuable vacuum-tube-circuit patents had joined in. What was lacking was money and people and priorities. Watson supplied them.
The SSEC was built in Endicott, under the toughest kind of forced draft, out of standard pieces and simple circuitry. Only IBM could have done it. No other outfit had stuff on the shelf - well, except the phone company, and it was too hidebound; had no Watson, and wanted none. By today's standards the cost was low; not much over a million dollars. But T.J. brooked no nonsense from beancounters. There was a story in the trade that when Claude Shannon and his lovely wife were moonlighting at the Murray Hill Bell Labs, and "borrowing" components from the stockroom to build a maze mouse, accountants disguised as [-6-] janitors were recording every peculation and taking notes for the patent attorneys besides.
None of that in 1946/47 IBM. The million dollars or so was off the top; the myriad services which Hamilton drew on from all the rest of the company, ranging from the time of Eckert and McPherson down to that of the Endicott janitors, were never charged. No one knows - in fact, no one ever wasted time trying to find out - what share of IBM's total resources over say 18 months went into the SSEC. I'd bet it was four or five per cent, at a time when total annual sales worldwide were well under $200 million. Ah, Watson!
I said McPherson was approximately Wallace's boss. There were no organization charts in IBM, and if there were any in 1958 when I was invited back to the much larger company - T.J. died in 1956 - I never saw them. Tasks in the Forties came almost entirely from Mr. Watson. If John had needed to force something on Wallace - and he almost certainly never did, at least for many years - he would have had to somehow arrange that his needs reached T.J. The latter, if he agreed, would have given Eckert the word, and in no uncertain terms. The idea of formal, announced channels of authority so prevalent in General Electric in the Fifties when I worked there, was unheard of in IBM. Mr. Watson ran everything.
By extension, there was no budget. Oh, there were accountants; there were taxes due in many countries, an annual report to produce, invoices to send and bills to pay. And some very strange Watson charities and beneficences, we understood. But in general, people downstairs proposed and Mr. Watson disposed. You - well, not me, but Eckert for instance - you sat outside The Old Man's office until someone shoehorned you in between the man from the Metropolitan (Opera or Museum; he did both) and the regional manager he was "promoting" to run the Anchorage office. You asked briskly for what you needed, answered amazingly pointed questions, and got your money or your refusal, or something in between. Very quickly!
I have often said Watson kept the money in a shoebox, and handed it out to petitioners as he saw fit. That's amusing, and somewhat true, but it doesn't allow for two things: first, the box never ran empty; he had a magnificent feel for the inflows as well as a running score on recent disbursements. Second, there were secret forces at work, like those Shannon-watchers; he built the French plant about that time, and there must have been many cross checks. He could expand Poughkeepsie off the cuff, but something more sophisticated must have been coming over the wires from World Trade in Europe. And he had more than sources of information; he had hidden controls. Watson could speed up or slow down the factories, and deliveries, and hence rental income - there was always an eager waiting line of customers, especially at war end. All it took was a short call or note to George Richter, the Gray Eminence Of Scheduling, two floors away.
Even in the Forties, IBM was something special. Small compared to, say, General Electric, it was already recognized for its amazing growth, its cash flows (for years to come, the punched card machines and the early computers would only be rented), its lovely profits, and above all, its Maximum Leader. Watson was into everything: not just the opera and the art world, but as the most powerful trustee of Columbia, the head of the International Chamber of Commerce, and in a hundred power-related civic tasks and charities. A whole floor of World Headquarters, "590" [590 Madison Avenue], could barely hold the secretaries and assistants that surrounded this power source. Where an AT&T or an RCA would have had to go through carefully announced organizational maneuvers, and much-discussed budget reallocations, [-7-] to start up a Hamilton group, T.J. did it in minutes. And with the Endicott and World Headquarters grapevine carrying the word about Watson's heavy support, Hamilton in turn could cut through personnel and procurement problems almost instantly. And these were serious; remember, this was 1946 - even IBM was having trouble with people and supplies. Frank's engineers had expediters up and down Cortlandt Street looking for surplus electronic gear, and the major factor in choosing vacuum tube types for the buffer memory and arithmetic unit of the SSEC was availability ("We need ten thousand right now, Sol, and they gotta work!").
In parallel with the electronic and mechanical work - system design, we call it now - the physical layout and handsome presentation of the huge machine had to go ahead. As soon as The French Bootery was known to be extrudable, plans for a big power supply and a unique air conditioning system were set in train; each unprecedented in central Manhattan and in IBM experience. No replays would be possible.
The machine took form in Endicott. A year, in spite of the Watsonian directive, was not enough. But in that year, all of the electronics, the sixteen-foot-high racks of special Lake relays, and the incredible tape units, were designed and built and tested. "The Soul of a New Machine" tells about a tiny child's circus, and with thirty years of industry experience to draw on; this was center ring in The Big Top: "Ladies and gentlemen, a feat never before attempted on any continent!!".
On 57th Street, the heavy machinery went in. Also there was to be a raised floor - another world first. Watson would not have his guests, his customers, his stockholders tripping over snarls of cable. The inscription on the wall had to be written, by Wallace Eckert I think, and approved (and quite possibly changed) by The Old Man, and engraved, and approved again. But that, as we all know today, is only half the story. How about the software?
No problem about languages - there weren't any yet. Whatever problem we chose would be written, and debugged, and run, in machine language, and in absolute: two four-address instructions per line of input tape. Eckert and I talked it over: one very short meeting. It would be from astronomy, of course; that was our trade. The very first automated scientific calculations in the world had been done by the great L.J. Comrie at Greenwich in the early Thirties, and had drawn both of us into the game. And if we redid them, more carefully, and from the original math rather than from intermediate tables, as Comrie had had to do with his rented Hollerith equipment, the output would have actual immediate value to the national almanac offices around the world. So - the SSEC would calculate the positions of the Moon!
Eckert had insisted from the beginning on a strong table-lookup capability: a design offshoot of the big tape drives, as it turned out. Its capabilities were set. For the demonstration problem, each date put in would require looking up 1870 sines and cosines, to eight-figure accuracy. I had begun to develop a powerful method for minimizing the size of such tables (later it came into heavy use among operators of the first IBM mass-production, um, minicomputer, which had only a few dozen words of storage - and the technique disappeared completely a year or two later, overtaken by Big Memory).
[-8-] The method wasn't quite ready, but no matter; off I went to design the table anyhow. Like everything else, it had to be ready on time - or else! Youngsters in corners at World Headquarters were feverishly writing code, without knowing the first thing about lunar theory. That too had to be finished and checked out by opening day. Eckert was the authority (I had a substantial computing shop to run at the Watson Lab, and classes to teach - and some of the youngsters were in them). Somehow it got put together.
It is worth noting that the check calculation, done on a Friden desk calculator by Eckert's assistant Becky Jones, took more than three months - for one date! And even then, we did not have time to exactly duplicate the table lookup and the arithmetic operations to the full precision of the machine, which was fourteen decimal digits; other tests of the pertinent units, and my off-line experiments on the sine/cosine table, had to suffice. I often wondered in later years, when lunar landers were putting down on an object whose coordinates came out of an ephemeris based on those 1947 programs, whether anyone had ever gone back and checked out the less-significant digits!
Incidentally, among the youngsters were John Backus, the father of FORTRAN, and Ted Codd, the father of relational databases.
The programs, and data, and my table material, were punched at the Watson Lab on standard IBM cards. These were converted to input tapes on a free-standing punch called The Prancing Stallion (from its profile), which later was put in its final position on the SSEC raised floor. Some program testing was done under Rex Seeber while the machine was partly assembled in Endicott, but most of it had to be deferred until just before the ceremony. This partially explains why I was Cool-Hand Luke years later at GE; after that kind of pressure, the jet engine business looked pretty peaceful!
About those tapes: the card plant in Endicott got enormous rolls of card stock from the paper mills. For regular card manufacturing they slit the rolls to three-inch width (card height). For the SSEC they furnished rolls eight inches wide (card length). The resulting rolls weighed 400 pounds, and had to be hoisted onto the SSEC with a thoughtfully-provided chain fall! For the Stallion, we pushed the rolls up a ramp.
The punch stations, slightly modified from standard IBM reproducer components, punched two round sprocket holes at the edges, and 78(!) regular IBM rectangular holes in between. The sprockets drove the tape one line at a time, and drives under separate program control fed the fresh or pre-punched tape under ten 78-brush reading stations. The tapes hanging down could lengthen and shorten, and for program tapes and the table lookup unit we cemented the tape end-to-end into short loops (yes, someone had had to provide the jig). There were three of these monsters at the end of the machine room.
Up to 36 of the fixed-length tape loops could be mounted on the separate table-lookup unit, which in later years was also sometimes used for program reading. For the lunar calculation, I used 24 loops to make lookup time as short as possible, and we got programming from the main tape readers.
Behind the scenes were racks and racks and racks of superfast small relays, which were used for intermediate storage. The tapes were slow [-9-] storage, and of course we had infinite storage on standard punched card decks, which could be read by the SSEC directly (and punched). The two printers behind the operator had hidden plugboards for producing handsome output formats.
On the famous Thursday when The Old Man ordered us to remove the offending columns, Rex and his crew had had all of these units buzzing and punching and looping. But the lunar program had not yet run. I was smugly aware that the sine/cosine table was checked out and working, so I was somewhat relaxed. But the strains were literally palpable. It was to be a long weekend!
Two months before, Hamilton had committed to an opening date: Tuesday January 27, 1948. He had done his fantastic task - designed and built the huge system, assembled and partially tested it in Endicott, torn it down and shipped it to Manhattan, fended off the unions who demanded that non-union IBM let them reassemble the monster, provided the support systems, and prettied up the joint - all in a little over 16 months. And, to jump ahead a little, on opening day, everything ran! Yes, the hardware, and the program, and the air conditioning, and the people - one of the very greatest feats of nearly a century of data crunching!
On the great day, the multitude assembled. It was not the first major Watson charivari I had attended, but it was a first for Rex and his senior crew. Everyone looked very cool and confident: T.J. himself because he assumed everything was as ordered, the rest of us because he was watching. The scientific contingent turned out in full force; I hosted one table at lunch, and landed Richard Courant, whom I greatly admired and had never met. I unblushingly told him I had done the invitation list - well, I had proposed, even if Wallace and John McPherson and a whole floorful of Watson aides had disposed. He was more interested in my stories about the punched card work we had done for Los Alamos than in the SSEC; like most of the seniors present he assumed that there would never be more than two or three machines like the one being dedicated, and that only very special science would ever be allowed near them. Today the NYU center named after Courant mounts several hundred thousand times as much computing power as the SSEC, and complains about the constriction!
Mr. Watson - you couldn't call him anything else at that moment - made a sententious little speech and posed for photographs with guests, including Rabi of Columbia and other scientists. One could often figure out who wrote the draft of a Watson speech; I could hear Eckert in this one, but the overall effect was preachier - probably from Dwayne Orton, editor of THINK. They had done the internal photos, the poses with Hamilton and Eckert and Seeber, the previous Thursday; this was a day for his guests and personal friends; another Watson triumph. He had many every year.
Six months later my wife Dorothy and I received a telegram, delivered to our apartment in Chelsea, although addressed to the Watson Lab at Columbia (T.J. had special relations with Western Union, too!) It invited us to an IBM Family Weekend, at the Waldorf Astoria no less, to thank the men who had worked so hard on the magnificent Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, [-10-] now at work on important scientific problems at IBM World Headquarters - and especially to thank their wives, who had been so supportive.
Turned out that the last time The Old Man had done this (also without warning), he had organized a private train and taken a hive of senior executives and their wives across country to see the IBM exhibit at the San Francisco World's Fair. It had been a very dry trip, even with Pullman porters fanning out at every stop looking for liquid relief. This event had benefited from that experience; the Waldorf had been found to list bar tabs and such as "restaurant" on the final bill!
You can imagine the scurry for babysitters and new hats in Endicott. Well, come the great day Mr. and Mrs. Watson had a little luncheon for us (and a hundred or so Headquarters executives and their wives) in the Wedgewood Room, and told the honored if somewhat flustered ladies that the weekend was theirs. "Go to restaurants and theaters and the opera, as IBM's guests. Enjoy the shops, and the spectacle of New York. We at World Headquarters thank you for the support you and your families gave your husbands, which in turn enabled them to produce this spectacular machine." There were tours of the SSEC, by the way, which many of the wives had not seen - a nice touch.
Asides: of well over two hundred ladies present at the luncheon, only two, my wife Dorothy and Hilleth Thomas' wife Naomi, did not wear hats. Hmmmf! Intellectuals! And the next night the Watson Lab couples, who after all lived in the city, had a fancy dinner together, in the hotel. As a matter of convenience, sitting at one end of the table, I signed the check: about $200 (it would be ten times that today). Six weeks later Eckert got a phone call from a hushed-voice little beancounter at 590. "About this, ah, rather large restaurant charge..." Eckert told him it was quite all right; he had been in the party. There were accountants in IBM; they just didn't come out of hiding very often!
Watson got his investments back many-fold: the price of the SSEC, and the price of that Family Weekend. The one placed him in front in the Big Science sweepstakes, at a time when a dozen larger hi-tech companies should have towered over him. The other confirmed the feeling in two hundred engineering and executive families that Mr. Watson's IBM was a wonderful place to belong to. It was a good time to be an emperor.
In Chapter 02 you will encounter
(in order of appearance):
The Naval Observatory where Eckert did the Air Almanac
Pearl Harbor you could see the smoke from the Japanese Embassy garden
Dorothy 01
NBS [The National Bureau of Standards] still on Conn Avenue in D.C.
William Meggers NBS spectrographer
Uranium undoubtedly for the Stagg Field pile
The Watson Lab 01
The American Air Almanac to be done on IBM machinery
John Willis officemate at the Naval Observatory
The Ritchey-Chrétien [reflecting telescope] notorious plate breaker
J VIII [Jupiter's eighth satellite] the lost is found - and a Ph.D. too
Harvard summer conferences optical design skills, and a fiancée
Leland Cunningham my opposite number at Harvard
Aberdeen Proving Ground where Cunningham did his war work
Army Air Corps geodetic surveying in Alaska
BuOrd [Navy Bureau of Ordnance] exit pupils and boresights
Stanley Ballard he traded up to Re4e from pineapples
American Institute of Physics optics and a lot more
Russell Banker a link to the pre-war Gun Factory
MIT Radiation Lab the word "radar" was still secret
Japanese optics captured gunsights were different from Zeiss'
NDRC [National Defense Research Committee] a "torrent of novelty"
The Alabama [new battleship] made us all forget BuOrd bureaucracy
Doc Draper [C. Stark Draper] his gunsight gave 20mm cannons more punch
Keuffel & Esser stereoscopic rangefinders from Hoboken
OSA [Optical Society of America] my second professional society
Foldboating Dorothy and I preferred it to spelunking
Sperry [Sperry Gyroscope Company] mechanism yes, radar yes, optics no
Suzy [cat] many litters in a Hempstead coal bin
Interchemical Corporation spectrography and glossy black paint
The B-29 [bomber under design] fancy optics instead of a tail gunner
Eastman Kodak my first view of industrial research and development
Rudolf Kingslake Kodak's master lens designer
Harold Bennett wanted to automate ray tracing - on a Friden!
The Mark 14 Draper's gunsight went into mass production at Lake Success
George Bentley thousands of Mark 14s for the Pacific
Jack Varick [Sperry buyer] "it took more than scientists to win a war"
Perkin-Elmer from astronomical telescopes to war work
The Mark 15 [gun director] we put optics and radar into a full box
C.L. Farrand his factory needed a second optical designer
Sy Rosin Farrand Optical Company designer
[-13-] There was of course no such thing in World War II as a civilian draft; at least, not in the United States. There was a military draft, and millions of youngsters had been involved with it. A fair percentage escaped from the process. I was one. Yet when I talk in the next chapter about how I came to IBM and the Watson Lab, and overnight to be in complete charge of one of the most powerful computing installations in the world, I usually say,"I was drafted" - that is, drafted into a civilian job.
I clung to the Navy for a while after the war started. I was at the U.S. Naval Observatory, just up the street from the Japanese Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, at Pearl Harbor time. My wife Dorothy, having helped me finish my doctoral dissertation, and fired with California patriotism - a somewhat more vigorous form than the District of Columbia variety - had drawn on her Mount Wilson connections to obtain a laboratory job at the Bureau of Standards. We were surrounded by the excitements of the time.
Dorothy's work turned out three years later to have been involved with the atomic projects, although we didn't know it then. Her boss was a famous spectrographer, William Meggers, who was an authority in metals analysis, and Dorothy found herself obtaining and measuring (she was new to the former but very experienced at the latter) spark spectrograms of the rare element uranium. We talked about it freely; there was no security, no hint of anything mysterious - except that, aside from very specialized uses such as coloring glass, and from its unusual density, uranium wasn't exactly an everyday market item.
Both of us, as astronomers, knew of the Hahn-Meitner experiments on the fission of uranium under laboratory conditions, and I had been an avid reader of science fiction for over thirteen years, so we wondered idly about whether there might be a connection. But neither of us had been close to that kind of physics. I was doing the driest and most remote kind of celestial mechanics; [-14-] she had been doing observational astrophysics at Mount Wilson. We didn't have day to day contact with the quantum mechanics people, although I had had courses from them (Goudsmit, for one) two or three years back.
Incidentally, that kind of security, out of fashion for decades, is very effective - no obvious security at all, that is. What you keep secret is that there is anything to keep secret. If Dorothy had had to take a lie detector test, and list all of her addresses from conception, and all her Swedish third cousins, we would have known something important was up. As it was, we didn't pick at it, and tended to talk about her problems in preparing samples!
A great deal of the work at the Naval Observatory had value in the war effort. There was the time service, obviously, and the continuing annual preparation of the astronomical ephemeris and marine navigation almanac. Right across the hall from me was the first permanent rent-paying scientific IBM installation, hard at work on the brand new Air Almanac. But these activities tended to be staffed by older men and women, and such younger men as were involved were much married and bechildered. Also, turnover in those barely-post-depression days was low. It didn't look as though I could offer help in those areas. Of course, the more purely astronomical tasks such as my own were going to continue; the observatory had weathered earlier wars and intended to keep its key researches alive. An astronomical observation is like a modern airline seat; you have to take it when available - tomorrow will be too late.
I was rather surprised, for instance, to discover that some solar observations that were collected in my division were routinely being sent to Italy for international compilation. Italy was at war, so the stuff had to be routed through Switzerland. But science was to be served!
I had some ideas about improving the reflecting telescope on the grounds. Because of the bright lights of the city, completely surrounding the minor hill on which the Naval Observatory stood, not much "modern" (i.e. astrophysical) use had been made of this strange beast. In fact, when I arrived it was used only a fraction of a night per week, as against every clear night for the huge old fashioned refractor - the one with which the tiny satellites of Mars had been discovered many decades ago. As an important part of my thesis calculations, I did a prediction of where to look near Jupiter for its eighth, extremely faint, satellite. John Willis, my office mate, had said there was no chance of photographing it locally. But when the city lights were shut down or dimmed as a wartime precaution - Japanese submarines coming up the Potomac, no doubt - we decided to give it a try. And there, right in the middle of the big photographic plate, after a ninety-minute exposure that could not have been made six months before, was my Ph.D. insurance, J VIII, later christened Pasiphae to please the space amateurs and the Carl Sagans.
This gave me the unpleasant experience of using the reflector, called a Ritchey-Chrétien type. The problem was that you had to use very thin glass plates, and bend them slightly to a spherical contour in special plate holders. Many broke in the process, and a few even broke afterwards when they were being released for development, wasting the human and telescope time invested. I was fortunate; nevertheless, I had held my breath.
[-15-] It occurred to me to use my skills in computing higher optical aberrations, which I had acquired (along with a fiancée and a first taste for fancy Chinese food) at a summer course at Harvard in 1940. I would see if I could design a field-flattening lens so that ordinary photographic plates and plate holders could replace the special ones. Willis and other senior figures were startled at the idea. But no special permissions were required in those days; you just worked longer hours so as to add the new project to the assigned ones.
While I was happily at work on the idea, I got drawn into a typical informal just-after-Pearl-Harbor project on improving the maps of Alaska. The Army Air Force command involved needed to locate ground stations with geodetic accuracy. They wanted to use a very carefully levelled zenith camera, and were asking us astronomers to help.
I couldn't do much better for them than a minute of arc - say a mile on the ground. The officers were impressed, but we agreed it wouldn't be good enough. I suggested that if they took two exposures on each film, with the camera turned about the vertical axis in between, much less accurate measurements would show where the center of the field was. They looked unhappy, presumably because of the time needed to modify the cameras yet again, and went away.
I had had fun. I had been caught up in the Real War for a few weeks. The fly boys had come to me because of my optical knowledge. Could I use it elsewhere? Not at the observatory, probably. I cast about. In retrospect, I should have looked farther afield, and certainly taken more time. My opposite number at Harvard, a strange plump creature named Leland Cunningham, ended up running an IBM shop at Aberdeen Proving Ground and writing the sample-problem specs for ENIAC. But it took him a year or so to get the job, and I wanted to do something right away - a trait that will surface many times in these stories!
Also Dorothy was doing very well indeed in her new job at the Bureau of Standards, and having uprooted her only the year before from lovely Pasadena, I wanted to stay in Washington if I could. Simple inquiries revealed that the Navy had need of optical experts in the Bureau of Ordnance. Presto! I was a P-2 Assistant Physicist in BuOrd Re4, Fire Control Research and Development. And at a pleasant salary increase besides: $2600 a year.
Doesn't sound like much today, but on the strength of such wealth Dorothy and I bought our first house. It was brand new, located in Kensington, Maryland, on an unpaved street - and cost $8500. It is probably still there (they paved the street after the war), and I'll bet it now goes for ten times our price.
Most of BuOrd was housed in horrid temporary structures left over from World War I, and I was put to work in a gigantic drafting room at the very back of the buildings. My routine, six days a week of course, was ten minutes walk to the Kensington Jitney, twenty minutes ride to Chevy Chase Circle, thirty minutes more downtown. Plus connecting waits, plus the Ordnance Amble from the front door and the guards to the sign-up sheet; call it an hour and a half. Dorothy was in a five-way car pool; gasoline rationing had begun.
I worked for a civilian named Mike Goldberg, an expert on mechanical linkages, a curious component of the analog gun directors that are now one [-16-] with the dinosaur and the dodo. He passed on assignments from the young Re4e officers, who worked in somewhat more pleasant quarters down the hall. Their boss was a two-striper named Stanley Ballard, who had been an insignificant physics professor in Hawaii when the war started. He fit the job well, and afterwards used his connections to rise quite high in the American Institute of Physics.
Another physics type was Urner Liddell, who was seconded much later to work on the postwar nuclear tests in the Pacific. And there were several others, all quite serious about their uniforms but none very knowledgeable about old-fashioned lens-and-mirror optics, which was a backwater of 1942 physics in the same way that my orbit computing specialty had been a backwater of 1936 astronomy. So I was welcome, although on my side I knew too much about the subject rather than too little. That is, I knew about higher aberrations of fancy astronomical telescopes and Schmidt cameras, and not much about gunsights!
Anyhow, Goldberg sat me down next to a career civil servant, an engineer from the Naval Gun Factory named Russell Banker, who knew plenty about gunsights but very little about theory. We made a good team, and in only a few days I knew about parallax and exit pupils and such. Also, Re4f (next door to Re4e) turned out to be the boys who did radar, so secret still that the name was not used in public, and through them I first heard of the gigantic buildup at MIT, which was for disguise called the "Radiation Laboratory". So there were lots of new work tools on the one hand, and war vistas far beyond those at the Naval Observatory, on the other.
About the difference between gunsight optics and fancy aberration theory: when I came up for my thesis defense in Ann Arbor, a few weeks after moving to BuOrd, I tried to explain to the physics prof on my committee what I was doing. He was, by coincidence, the optics man at Michigan, and was so put off by my plebeian use of his elegant science that he sat on the suggestion I get a cum laude for recovering J VIII. Sigh!
I had a nice Friden calculator - such gadgets were already under wartime allocation - and was put to work on donated British and captured Japanese gunsights. The latter were tested and disassembled at the Gun Factory, the lens parameters measured, and the dope sent over to Re4e for analysis and comment. I was startled to be told that, while Japanese optics were supposedly copied from the Germans, the Navy patent files showed nothing similar from Zeiss or thereabouts. This was the first indication I personally had had that Japanese technology was not just duplication and adaptation. It was confirmed several times for me during the war; first hand in optical engineering, anecdotally in nearby fields like fire control and radio. So I was not as surprised as the media and the public when the Japanese cameras and consumer electronics came on strong two decades later.
The load increased. Somebody produced an assistant for me, a young New Yorker who yearned audibly for the fleshpots of the Grand Concourse but found working in BuOrd preferable to boot camp. Indeed, after I left Washington things got tighter in the Bronx draft boards, and they took him away. His output was low, and supervising him took more time than he saved me - another lesson to store away for Watson Lab futures. But there was [-17-] indeed some small pleasure in command, or at least I found it an interesting departure from being commanded.
The pressures of a Real War were fascinating. Major projects, considerable excursions from old ways of doing things, could be set up in days. I was accustomed as a budding scientist to "keeping up with the literature", so the flood of reports and recommendations and proposals didn't faze me the way it did the older civil servants like Banker and the drafting room types. I began to realize that having young physicists in the Re4 offices was working better than their lack of practical experience might have promised.
For instance, there was a horrendous shortage of fancy rangefinders, and of experienced operators on shipboard. Some years back a decision had been made to adopt stereo rangefinders rather than split-field. In a peacetime service the Navy could take the time to select and train sailors with keen depth perception. Now they needed ten times as many, instanter. Re4e beat the bushes for psychologists, and also for firms to design and build training gadgets. The bright people under Ned Land at Polaroid were among those who surfaced.
I wasn't directly involved, but had lots of ideas and advice to offer anyhow - much of it unwelcome, because there was so little time to argue. Decide! Act! Try something else; we just lost another carrier! In my drafting room men were worrying about the torpedoes that unexpectedly failed to work. Was it the fire control equipment they had designed, or manufacturing problems, or poor training, or something unforeseen? There were horror stories from the European theaters too. I still remember one about the escape hatches on one type of bomber being just a little too small for a gunner with his parachute to squeeze through. Solution: select very small gunners!
There was a weird project to increase the accuracy of those stereo rangefinders by filling them with helium instead of dry nitrogen, and that involved a Princeton professor named Merrill Flood who surfaced thirty years later in Management Information Systems - another helium-filled instrument! The NDRC, National Defence Research Committee, under the aegis of Vannevar Bush, produced such projects, and academics to staff them, in an amazing torrent of novelty. But I learned little about radar, and heard nothing about atomic weapons.
With all this excitement and hard work, there were still strange interludes. The battleship Alabama was commissioned and before going off to first station, anchored in Chesapeake Bay for a week or so. Annapolis got a day, and us Navy civilians got a day; we were bussed over, put aboard via glamorous launches, and allowed to clamber all over the huge ship. My gang looked at fire control gear: gun turrets, gun directors, rangefinders, radar equipment. Others looked at propulsion, or ammunition hoists, or whatever. Great idea; it charged us all up for weeks; we even quit complaining about the (lack of) air conditioning!
Another: one day a very academic type from the University of Chicago showed up at BuOrd and walked off with a best-design submarine periscope. Since periscopes were even scarcer right then than submarines, we were all flabbergasted. Of course, three years later I realized he had been outfitting [-18-] the Stagg Field pile, for Fermi and Co.! It was the second clue Dorothy and I had had about the bomb, and we missed it as we missed the first.
Antiaircraft guns were increasingly important in the Pacific, although kamikaze attacks were still rare. These cannon were then directed by gunsights attached to the guns. There were few skilled gunners; the old open sights that we still see in World War II movies didn't let novices knock down many attackers. So, technology - in fact, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - came to the rescue. Doc Draper, whose big postwar enterprise was to draw student and flowerpower protest in Cambridge in the Sixties, was designing an analog computer, later to be called the Mark 14 Gunsight, to replace the low-tech ring sights. The latter cost maybe $50; the Mark 14s, even in huge quantity, cost nearly $10,000 - but the warships the kamikazes were damaging cost a lot more!
I came in contact with that effort in a roundabout way. The 20mm cannon involved had to be boresighted on shipboard. That is, you had to make sure the cannon and the gunsight were lined up. The sight was no problem, but when a gunner looked through the bore of this skinny little gun his field of view was so tiny he often wasted much time finding the boresighting target. I had the idea of putting a plug with a negative lens in it, in the gun muzzle, and another, with a positive lens, and a mirror to make things convenient, in the breech. A reverse telephoto or reverse opera glass, in effect; what it did was increase the field of view fourfold. The demagnification of the target didn't matter; if anybody cared, a bigger one could be used. Well, much to my pleasure, a small company was found to make the little kit, and in some quantity. I still have the drawings, but nobody ever sent me a sample. Ah, wartime!
This sounds like a lifetime. Actually, I had come down to BuOrd from the Observatory in May [1942], had gotten my Ph.D. in June, and all the excitements I've been reciting had taken about six months. Some of it was the war, some of it was biological; the clock runs differently when you are 24 - and the gonads too, for sure! I did some travelling; notably, flew up to the rangefinder production operation at Keuffel & Esser in Hoboken, in a two-seater Navy trainer with a nice Re5 flyboy who did barrel rolls until I informed him grimly that I was about to throw up all over his airplane! I joined the OSA, Optical Society of America, and because I had lots of surplus energy - and it didn't hurt any that I was sponsored by Dorothy's boss Meggers, an OSA bigwig - began rising in that hitherto-conservative outfit.
Also at the Bureau of Standards Dorothy had encountered an unusual outdoor group. They called themselves spelunkers (cavers, in Britain). They specialized in exploring Schoolhouse Cave in nearby West Virginia, longer drives being impossible under gas rationing. We were not much into caves - darkness, and narrow places, and a lot of mud - but two dozen of the bunch were foldboaters. They had learned about the sport on pre-Hitler European travels, brought the folding rubber-skinned kayaks back with them and stored them in their Washington closets, and went out on the upper Potomac and such, when the water was white and the weather not too grim. I'll have more to tell about the sport, which was the first of many high-thrill adventures I have enjoyed after emerging from my soft [-19-] childhood; anyhow, Dorothy and I bought one of the last prewar foldboats available, and tried to learn by doing.
There wasn't much other social life, especially for newcomers. The Naval Observatory crew was pretty inbred, and the BuOrd civilians were the same. Ballard and his young officers were learning to be Navy - Navy Reserve, we said cuttingly - and had special privileges we mortals lacked. The Meggers family had a big house out toward the Bureau, which was then on Connecticut Avenue, and invited us several times. They ran to collections of many kinds, and indeed in postwar the oldest daughter became a well-known anthropologist, which is sort of people-collecting. We liked them and admired Meggers himself very much; he was a cross between a senior scientist and a Will Rogers, and had a comic feud going with George Harrison of MIT, the world-famous designer of ruling engines (on which the diffraction gratings for Dorothy's spectroscopes were made). Dorothy's part of NBS, in fact, looked very much like the Harvard astronomy milieu out of which I had plucked my optical theory and my marriage.
We were isolated, besides. I had been a part of the Ann Arbor scene, and Dorothy, of the Cal Tech/Mount Wilson scene, for six years. Washington was very different, and especially in wartime. We had a house, and problems with furniture, and not much money, and our personal relationships to work out. So what time was left over from pretty heavy work commitments got used up fast. Neither of us were family-dependent; still, it didn't help any that mine were in Michigan and Dorothy's in California.
I was restless. I had enjoyed the little burst of creativity while I was doing the boresight design. And I was more than a little jealous of Navy officer privilege; you didn't actually have to bow when a four-striper swept down the hall, but you felt that nobody would be surprised if you did! The wartime selection process put some great guys in the Pacific (or so the papers told us, between accounts of the many U.S. disasters) but the ones left behind on Constipation Avenue, as we frequently called it, didn't turn me on.
Seemed like I ought to be able to help more, and be more creative, and still not rile my Michigan draft board. Dorothy was willing, if not eager. We had decided not to try pregnancy, let alone parenthood, for a while yet, so we were portable. I cast about, and almost immediately tripped over the Mark 14, which was being boresighted with my gadget. The Draper Gunsight, as it was still called, was going into mass production at Sperry Gyroscope up on Long Island; meanwhile, would I consider a position at their Garden City laboratories as a fire control scientist? I certainly would!
The house was simple: we told the real estate agency we were leaving, they kept the payments we had made so far, the papers got torn up, and somebody moved in as we left - same day, in fact. Washington! We called a mover and our very minor possessions were collected at Sperry expense, and reappeared a few days later (after all, it was wartime, and a very small part load besides) in Garden City.
We had found another house, in nearby Hempstead, after about two days. We knew no more would be built; the remaining potato fields would survive until we left in 1948, as it turned out. In fact, our little place had been too late for a gas hot water heater; there was a gas stove, but hot water came via pea [-20-] coal and a peculiar pot stove in the basement, which went out several times a week. Our cat Suzy had her many litters in the big crate we kept the special coal in, next to the regular coal bin beside the hot-air furnace. The house cost $11,000 but the down payment, although not as minuscule as in Kensington, was only $1500. And we had a garage; useful on Long Island, where clearly there weren't going to be any new cars for a while, or even new tires. Our neighbors were not war types; on one side, a barber; on the other, a lead-burner (he said "boiner") who did things like chemical sinks, and industrial plumbing in general.
Dorothy answered ads for a while, and found a job in Manhattan as an industrial spectroscopist at the labs of the Interchemical Corporation, which until the war had been mostly making printing inks and special paints. In fact, they were about to get a contract for a surprising black paint for the Black Widow night fighter. The surprise was that it was not dull, dull black but high-gloss; turned out one of those NDRC professors had shown that the returns when a searchlight found such a plane were less for specular reflection!
She had general work to do, metals and pigments and such, but also was trying to apply spark technology to organic materials like amino acids. Hasn't survived; things like infrared spectroscopy and chromatography are easier and more general. But she had some fun, and felt useful. Main trouble was that she had to commute on the notorious Long Island Railroad, plus a short hop on the Eighth Avenue subway, which wreaked havoc in our sex life. And six days a week!
Meanwhile, between attempts to keep the pot stove in our basement going, I was entering a new world of optical complexity. Of course the K&E Navy rangefinders were fantastic, but those designs had been frozen before Pearl Harbor. My Sperry project was in the design stage, or at least in design revision after prototyping. It was a double-ended aircraft periscope, to stick out of the top and bottom of the secret new B-29 bomber, mid-fuselage. There were small plastic domes through which the optics looked at attacking aircraft. When the gunner tracked a plane across the zero-elevation "equator", a prism flipped the eyepiece field from the upper to the lower periscope or vice versa. The junction case also contained an analog computer featuring three-dimensional cams, rate gyros, and a hundred pounds of ancillary gear. Outputs from the system were to control remote machine gun turrets on the top and bottom of the plane, and at the tail. One human advantage was that there would be no poor devil as tail gunner. The system had a major competitor from General Electric, which won out in the end, but that was some years in the future - in fact, so was the B-29, which was still under design and test at Boeing Seattle. And it too had competitors in 1943.
The periscope and all its complex optics had been designed, and would be built, by the Hawkeye Works of Eastman Kodak, in Rochester. Sperry Gyroscope furnished the central box and the entire gun turret complex, with much hydraulics from Vickers, another division of Sperry Corporation. My major job was to keep track of Kodak progress, check proposed design improvements, approve the optical tests at Hawkeye, and generally represent the Garden City crew in a completely novel arena. They knew fire control, [-21-] radar (the Varian brothers were big guns on the staff), and hydraulics. As far as lenses and prisms were concerned, well, they knew they were made of glass. Usually!
It was fascinating. There were all kinds of new ideas. The plastic domes on the ends of the periscopes introduced a systematic error in elevation; should we put a mechanical correction cam in the computer or make the inner and outer surfaces of the domes non-concentric? Would new eyepiece designs (like the ones in today's most expensive binoculars, and actually a copy of a Zeiss patent) really improve gunner performance - wider field, yes, but more distortion?
Main thing for me, though, was meeting an individual. As I began to make frequent trips up to Kodak, usually by overcrowded train, I had more and more to do with a real lens design expert, the head of the Hawkeye group. He was an Englishman, Rudolf Kingslake, world famous in his very special field, and also the son-in-law of a chap named Conrady, the author of the treatise on lens design from which I was studying the art. There was supposed to be a second, unpublished volume of this opus, with much reference to photographic lenses, and Rudie, as his bevy of female computers called him, had the only copy. Great story, and it may even have been true; more likely, Kingslake knew enough to have written the volume himself!
He had a chap (Harold Bennett) working for him as a senior lens designer, who wanted to mechanize ray tracing calculations, which Kodak did with Fridens and Marchants, having stepped up from five-place logarithms in the Thirties. You could tell an optical computer by the fact that his or her trig tables were much dirtier - that is, much more frequently used - at the front (small angles), while astronomy or physics computers used all angles impartially! Today a programmable hand-held calculator would be much, much better, but such computations are now deeply imbedded in fancy overall design packages (expert systems) and no longer are performed out where designers can see them.
Having watched the punched card operations at the Naval Observatory, and having heard about all the fancy electronics in the MIT and Sperry radar equipments, I was quite sure attaching funny little servos to the keyboard and twiddlers of a Friden was not the way to go. But my obvious admiration for Kodak (and Kingslake) design skills, and my activities in the Optical Society, made up for my criticisms.
Some years later the prototype machine was demonstrated. It was so far behind what could be done with truly automatic equipment, and so far out of step with the promises of ENIAC and radar electronics, that it died. Compared to the room-sized machines of the late Forties, you could call it an early "micro"computer!
About this time the Mark 14 began to come off the assembly lines, and I was asked to move to the new Lake Success plant on Long Island (where the nascent UN activities lived later, while the Manhattan headquarters was being built). The work was entirely different, and I would have preferred to stay with the Garden City/Rochester project. But the war in the Pacific was central to everything, and the kamikazes were increasingly dangerous. The [-22-] Mark 14 was needed, and in vast quantities - one to every 20mm cannon, if possible.
The optics were exceedingly primitive. The gunner looked through the box, which was mounted right on the gun. He tracked the target plane through two very thin unsilvered glass plates, off which an image of bright crosshairs was reflected. The plates were wiggled by the innards of the gunsight - rate gyros working against springs, whose tensions were set by a range knob on the front of the sight. So they had to be light.
Sperry needed sources for tens of thousands of sets of these optics, and then to inspect them for adequacy and assemble them into the sights, and test the whole box on special calibration rigs. The set was two thick windows, two thin reflecting plates, a collimating lens (no problem), a special light bulb (ditto), and a reticle with a very fine transparent pattern on an opaque background. Parenthetically, the company we found which could etch the reticle pattern through a thin metal substrate is today active in chip fabrication - Buckbee Mears, it was called then.
My boss was a George Bentley, who had gotten a doctorate from Draper at MIT and then become director of research for Hamilton Watch. He teamed me with a buyer named Jack Varick, and sent us out to hunt glass and reticles. The thin plates were going to be difficult: optical glass, bubble and stria free, quite accurately dimensioned, and with the reflecting surfaces very flat and very parallel. Kodak could make them on their camera-lens line for a thousand bucks a pair, and I wasn't convinced mass quantities were possible. The shop tested them for flatness before uncementing them from the tool, and most of the plates sprang unflat after separation. Post-separation testing was tricky - expert hand work - and I was going to have to set up methods back at Sperry for girls to use, so I was very worried.
Jack remembered that quartz crystal plates, which he bought for the radar boys, had to be pretty fancy too, and to extremely close thickness tolerances besides. He found a company that could make what I needed in unlimited quantities, and for less than $50 a pair. It took more than scientists to win a war!
Buyers and travelling salesmen had other capabilities. Jack was an expert at finding the "action" - good wartime restaurants in Rochester, bars with stocks of Scotch in Chicago. He wasn't as interested as I in women, but was considerably more expert at dealing with them (I was a great judge of striptease - a much more passive skill). He learned a little about optical parts from me; I learned a lot about life on the road from him.
Back at the ranch I had to set up inspection methods. Sperry had used almost no optics; the regulars could handle the reticles and the light bulbs, but I had to do the rest. My astronomical antecedents got me into Perkin Elmer, which was so loaded down with high-priority work even Jack Varick and Sperry were not welcome. They were using a simple, sturdy interferometer for several inspection tasks, and I persuaded them to make me a couple. These became the heart of the Lake Success department. Wages were frozen, but I got a small raise anyhow.
One of the small pleasures of life was to walk down the long rows of girls and women on the assembly floor, and have them whistle at you. Men were [-23-] very scarce; even my pre-IBM goatee was acceptable. Dorothy was warily amused.
Bentley And Co. were now engaged in a much more ambitious project - to redesign and build the next Draper gunsight. This was to control quad-mounted 40mm cannon and even larger guns, would be free-standing, and needed to reach out much further for its targets. It therefore was to have a 5-power telescope, with lots of difficult optical goodies that are of little interest against today's Star Wars electronics.
I was asked to design - yes, design, not just approve, or inspect - an auxiliary optical system to superimpose a radar image from a tiny internal CRT, on the gunner's field of view. Trouble was, the box was full! I learned to greatly respect the skills of the senior designer/draftsmen, who moved things around for me. This came in handy later, in IBM and GE, when most of my confreres were carried away with exotic electronics. I still marvel today at the innards of the magnificent laser printers, knowing how demanding the mechanical parts of the system are, and therefore understanding that such machinery will remain expensive even with one-dollar chips, and will always require skilled maintenance.
There were procurement problems with this gunsight also (it was really a minidirector), notably to find a zero-thickness beamsplitter flat to less than a wavelength of light. Jack and I did it, but it wasn't as much fun the second time around. I didn't look forward to new inspection technology.
So in the fall of 1944 I began looking for a real design job. I knew I was not in the Kingslake class, but how would I ever get to that eminence beating the Utica bushes with Jack Varick? What I needed was a job at Perkin Elmer or Keuffel & Esser or Polaroid, if not at Bausch and Lomb or Kodak. And I found the Farrand Optical Company, in the very far Bronx.
Clare Farrand held valuable patents on the dynamic loudspeaker, and had answered the call of WW II by establishing a remarkable optical house, mostly with his own money, to tackle the toughest level of the technology. For instance, Farrand was building a very complex large rangefinder. That was the province of Bausch and Lomb in Rochester and K & E in Hoboken - and Zeiss in Jena, of course. Kodak's Hawkeye works had tried to build a similar instrument, and it was giving them fits. Farrand had mastered that, and was looking for more difficult projects. They had a designer named Seymour Rosin, and needed another. It looked promising.
In Chapter 03 you will encounter
(in order of appearance):
Sy Rosin 02
Bob Tripp chief engineer at Farrand, and ex-Disney
The Flight Briefing Trainer "dodge-em cars and science fiction lighting"
Dorothy 01
Optical patents the mass of ray tracing reminded me of Comrie and Eckert
Wallace Eckert 01
Department of Pure Science the new IBM venture at Columbia
The Watson Lab 01
Columbia University Eckert's old Morningside Heights stamping ground
C.L. Farrand 02
The Manhattan Project Los Alamos wanted me taken me away
IBM World Headquarters later I christened it "Galactic Headquarters"
John von Neumann a major intellectual force on a dozen wartime fronts
I.I. Rabi 01
Los Alamos still ostensibly a post office box in Santa Fe, New Mexico
ASTOUNDING STORIES several hundred copies vanished into thin air
Lillian [Lillian Feinstein Hausman] hired by Eckert back in 1938
Stan Frankel and Nick Metropolis ran the special 601s at Los Alamos
Watson Senior 01
John McPherson 01
Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau doing war work upstairs
Pupin Physics Lab I got half of the tenth floor, and a big safe
Hans Bethe and Roy Marshak bomb physicists until Hiroshima
Maria and Joe Mayer the same; like Feynman, she later won a Nobel prize
Dick Feynman "like a torrent from a fire hose"
S. Chandrasekhar mathematical astrophysicist
Ev Yowell worked on the upstairs project with Lillian
Marj [Marjorie Severy Herrick] she ran the IBM machine room for me
Spherical explosion a simulation 50,400,000 times as slow as Alamagordo
Liz Ward a bluestocking rides the shock wave
"von Neumann ripples" "a nice dissertation topic", said Johnnie
Hiroshima now we knew what we had been working on
[-25-] No one else at Farrand lived on Long Island, let alone near Hempstead. And moving in wartime was almost impossible. So a major task when I accepted the job there was to convince my local rationing board that I had to drive over twenty miles a day each way, six days a week. It was actually harder than persuading my draft board, which by now was used to having my various employers claim that the entire war effort revolved around my fantastic scientific capabilities. But with a little help from my new personnel department both projects succeeded.
My poor little 1937 Plymouth soon edged past the 100,000 mark, but actually benefited from its new duties, since it was soon allowed a new set of tires and a better battery. Meanwhile, diligent Dorothy continued to suffer on the Lonn Guyland, as the veteran commuters called it. Even she got some pleasure from my gas coupons, however, since occasional little trips which we could not have done on an A-ration book (into Manhattan and back for a concert, for instance) became possible with a C sticker. And to my amazement, Farrand made me an allowance for gasoline and bridge tolls.
Sy Rosin and I reported to a man named Bob Tripp, who had been chief engineer for Disney, and was a fountain of weird ideas. Sy was conservative and I was still rather astronomical, so Tripp was a bridge to wilder shores. I have to get back to stories about the computer, but a short sample of the games we played may be fun, if only to show how differently we had to approach problems like flight simulation before we had computer graphics and heroic software.
Tripp had agreed to explore building a Flight Briefing Trainer, to simulate invasion approaches to the Pacific islands and the Japanese coastlines. He planned a large room with an absolutely flat terrazzo floor (in my cynical way [-26-] I claimed that this would be the hardest part of the whole project, and I was right). A powered cart with analog computing gear would run around on this floor with the same freedoms as a dodge-em car at a carnival, and would carry a simulated cockpit and controls, and the trainee. He would be looking into the eyepieces of a periscope, which stuck up through the roof of the cart and could be raised or lowered by the cockpit controls. On the ceiling was a gorgeous relief map of the target area, and the head of the periscope could come "down" close to the terrain. What a monstrosity!
I was charged with designing the head prism and top end of the optics, which had to replace the upper part of a specified Navy periscope. Tripp had already solved the problem of depth of focus, which is serious in all such model devices, by planning to synchronize rapidly changing focal length of my top lens with selective illumination of the map, on a 30-cycle-a-second basis. Good grief - dodge-em cars and science fiction lighting!
Most of it was built, I heard later, but fortunately the war ended before full operation was needed. I'd love to have seen it, and ridden it.
There was a great Christmas party [1944], where us upstairs types got a long-awaited chance to, ah, mingle with the all-female assembly and test crew from the rangefinder area. Dorothy had been hoarding red stamps to buy a Christmas Eve roast, which was ruined long before I staggered in from my long drive and other exhausting efforts, and collapsed on the sofa. It was a very cold Christmas, it was. A once-a-year fall from grace might have been forgiven, but coupled with other adventures which I had not concealed very well, and with those wasted ration points...
I finished the initial periscope head design and began on the eye end. The idea was to split the light into two eyepieces to simulate infinite-distance binocular vision, and also to feed in a view of the instrument panel. Then Tripp said one day that he and Mr. Farrand wanted to build optics for projection television after the war, and would I put a few hours a month on a library and patent search, since I knew about Schmidt and similar high aperture systems, and since the shop downstairs was making deep-dish mirrors on a secret contract? I quickly decided that to check out even a few patents would require hundreds of hours of ray-tracing - even with a machine like the one planned at Kodak!
Unlike an initial design, where you trace a ray or two and then change something, and trace a few more, in the assessment of finished designs you could select an assortment of rays in advance and trace them all through the first surface of the lens, or even through the first surface of each of several lenses under investigation. Then you could repeat through the second surface or surfaces, and then the third, and so on. I was of course reminded of Wallace Eckert's punched card shop at the Naval Observatory, and of Comrie's work at Greenwich, where calculations for many dates were carried ahead one step at a time.
Today we would immediately think of parallel computing, one of the major current big-machine enthusiasms. In a machine with say 1024 processors we could trace a hundred rays through each of ten lens designs (at a millisecond a surface),and finish all ten analyses in less than a second. In 1945 you could only have one "processor", and it would be a whole room full of [-27-] electromechanical punched card machines, and with two or three operators. Ten complex lenses might well take a week to run - but by hand it would take months.
One very nice thing about working at Farrand was that you were encouraged to keep up with the literature. And not just by subscribing to it yourself; the company took all the useful journals, and suggestions for additions to the list were welcome. These were circulated briskly, and Rosin and I were right behind Mr. Farrand and Bob Tripp in priority. In early April a very short article appeared in SCIENCE to the effect that the International Business Machines Corporation had appointed Dr. Wallace J. Eckert, former director of the Nautical Almanac Office at the Naval Observatory, as head of a new Department of Pure Science, and that he would be establishing a Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University.
The note said that the laboratory would have a full complement of IBM gear, which would be used for instruction and research. It mentioned Eckert's former connection with Columbia as chairman of the astronomy department, and somewhat sotto voce that the chief executive of IBM was a prominent trustee of the university. I saw the piece at the beginning of May, and immediately wrote Eckert a letter explaining my idea about mechanizing large-scale optical calculations. I suggested he might let me come over at night when things got rolling, and experiment a little. And to sugar-coat things I mentioned that my employer, "Farrand Optical in the Bronx", would have commercial use for such an application after the war.
Ten days later a little man showed up in Farrand's office. He introduced himself as representing a Manhattan Engineer District, a secret agency of the Army with offices in the Empire State Building. I never knew exactly how he approached it, but somehow he explained to Farrand, who of course had very high level personal security clearances, that something much more important than optical design was going on out in New Mexico. He produced my letter to Eckert, which Farrand had never seen, and said he wanted me for this operation at Columbia. Coooo!
They had me in. I was dumbfounded. I protested that I had not talked to Eckert, that I had had no idea of going to work for this new laboratory, that I liked it where I was. "No matter," said the little man. "Report to this Mr. Eckert tomorrow, and he will arrange everything. His office is at 590 Madison Avenue." I protested that no such impressment was possible - I remember using the term "shanghai" - and that my Michigan draft board would have to be consulted. But down inside, a great feeling of excitement was growing. I was going to get my hands on punched card machines at last, and do some massive computing.
The next days were a blur. I went in to Manhattan with Dorothy on the train the next day, and discovered that 590 Madison was the headquarters building of IBM. In later years I invented the name "Galactic Headquarters", but the Watsonites then called it merely "World Headquarters", capitalizing on the IBM phrase "World Peace Through World Trade" which T.J. had adopted in the Thirties. In typical IBM fashion, I was expected (although the reception desk was somewhat disconcerted by my beard and sport jacket). Eckert was indeed upstairs, and was delighted to see me.
Within a few minutes I knew that there was to be an atomic bomb. It was [-28-] mid-May, two months before the Alamagordo burst, but Eckert had not been cleared for such information. What he knew, and passed on to me, was that a secret laboratory had been established "near Santa Fe", that very senior scientists like his old friend I. I. Rabi of the Columbia physics department, and the famous John von Neumann, were prime movers, and that the group was harnessing the fission of uranium to make a fantastic weapon.
This laboratory, which I was to hear called Los Alamos a few days later, was officially just a post office box in Santa Fe (which among other curious mail got several hundred copies each month of ASTOUNDING STORIES!). Eckert told me that there was a major punched card installation there, with something like four IBM 601 multiplying punches, all of which could allow for algebraic signs and two of which could actually do division. There were supporting machines: tabulators and sorters and reproducers and such. The shop was run by Stan Frankel and Nick Metropolis (and, I found out many years later, Doc Nelson), who supervised a mixed bunch of young civilians and dragooned enlisted men; it was working around the clock and still falling behind, and there was neither floor space nor personnel to expand the operation.
"They came to IBM for help," Eckert said. "Mr. Watson and John McPherson (whom I was about to meet) thought immediately of the Astronomical Bureau at Columbia, but it is heavily engaged in fairly high priority work for another part of the Army, and really has no room for physical expansion anyhow. It has only two 601s and an old 285 fixed-plugboard tabulator, and there is hardly room to move."
What I had not thought of when I read the story in SCIENCE was that IBM itself had to have wartime priorities - and very high ones at that - to retain any of the machines that were coming down its overstressed production lines. Even the cards were under strict allocation. If T.J. wanted to help the war effort, and at the same time position his company for postwar scientific initiatives, here was the perfect opportunity. He had his all-seeing eye on Eckert, on the Naval Observatory shop, on Columbia of course. He was still outraged at Harvard. So he decided that there should be a new venture on Morningside Heights, told McPherson, who was then director of engineering at 590 Madison, to see to it, and turned to his next imperial task.
Eckert was offered a chance to go back to his beloved Columbia in a very prestigious role, a chance to direct a far more powerful computing facility than he had ever had before, a chance to build a better machine than Aiken's - and, as I found out sixteen years later, at two and a half times the rather good salary he was getting from Uncle Sam!
He had set up the little astronomy shop a decade ago with his own hands, but it had been run for the last five or six years by a vigorous woman he had selected and trained, named Lillian Hausman. The newer enterprise in Washington had been run for him by Jack Belzer, about whom more in later stories. Eckert needed another subordinate, and was therefore delighted to get my letter. I was well known to him, a fellow astronomer of the same celestial mechanics persuasion, a Ph.D. acceptable to his snooty Columbia buddies, an expert computer and numerical analyst - scarce as hen's teeth, especially in wartime - and I lived right next door! And also I came cheap, although it was [-29-] a year or two before I sadly recognized the fact. But I couldn't have said no, with that little man telling Farrand where to send me, could I?
Eckert and McPherson had worked out a list of machines, and the Columbia administration had found space on the tenth floor of Pupin, the physics building which contained the astronomy department and the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau. There was even an old teaching telescope up topside, for undergraduate use on the three clear Manhattan nights a year! The Los Alamos priorities began to function; crates of IBM equipment, chairs and tables and file cabinets (and a very big safe), cartons of punched cards and tabulator paper, all appeared as if by magic. What fancy priorities couldn't provide, IBM money and prestige - and Wallace's old Columbia connections - always could.
All I had to do was put it together. McPherson said he would send some bodies. I went upstairs and borrowed operating manuals from Lillian and her people, and asked naive questions about plugboards (Wallace had not ordered nearly enough). We all knelt down prayerfully in front of the hoary old 285 for my first wiring lessons - wasted, because it turned out we were getting a much fancier machine if the Pupin elevator was up to it. You have to understand that I had never even run a sorter!
Also I had summer flu, and Dorothy's parents arrived from California for a long visit. And the cat was pregnant again, but not urgently.
The intellectual excitement was enormous. In two weeks we had visits from Johnnie von Neumann, Hans Bethe, Roy Marshak, Maria and Joe Mayer, and - like a torrent from a firehose - one Richard Feynman. Three of them were to be Nobelists, and Johnnie was supposed to be the world's greatest applied mathematician (I was a Chandrasekhar rooter myself). The punched card boys were too busy to come, but Feynman seemed to know all about the machines (and everything else besides). For instance, he showed me how to wire a chain of selectors on my new 405 tabulator, a technique which in those days was too esoteric to be in an operating manual. He showed me once, and pretty briskly; you didn't get a second shot with Feynman! Lillian didn't know such tricks, Eckert didn't know, McPherson knew (he had edited "IBM Pointers" for a couple of years) but was far out of my reach. So I had to learn from a future Nobel prizewinner!
World Headquarters had me fill out a form or two, and took over the struggle with my draft board. I still have my original ID card, almost certainly the first one ever issued at 590 with a beard on it. There was no physical; a year or so later the personnel department ginned one up, and told me to get my tonsils out - no mention of removing the plaid lining in my sport jacket. I kept my tonsils, and have them today; they are healthier than the rest of me, having been exercised much more vigorously.
An expert machine operator? One appeared. Machine repairs? A very good man was on call. A receptionist? A secretary for Eckert? More plugwires? Coming right up! Ah, IBM!
The operator was an oldtimer named Cliff, who had the machine room culture down pat. He could joggle a vast wodge of cards, carried a sorting needle, knew how to stick chips back in a card for a quick fix. The customer engineer (IBM for "maintenance expert") showed me where the machine [-30-] blueprints were hidden. Lillian knew these things as well, but thought astronomers should be above such details; when I got tired of imitating Cliff I would sidle upstairs and talk to Everett Yowell, who was running the military project in the Astronomical Bureau for her (years later he was scientific marketing manager for NCR). He didn't have his Columbia degree yet, and had to be affable.
One day an attractive young blonde - sharp features, summer freckles, clear voice - came up from 590. Her name was Marjorie Severy, and she had just graduated from Wellesley with a math major. The personnel people thought she would make a possible machine room supervisor. She was just what we needed.
By this time Eckert and I knew that the unit of temperature in my calculations was a million degrees Kelvin, and so on. We kept the equations I was working with, and my translation into computable form (approved, with a warning, by the great Johnnie on his first visit), and the starting values, in the big safe. What Marjorie and Cliff and the others saw was a long shelf of 28 IBM plugboards, which when cycled through the various machines produced a messy and unlabeled printout from the 405 tabulator. While I bundled this up and mailed it with my own hands, registered, to von Neumann - later, to Marshak - at the anonymous Santa Fe box number, the machine room team began to repeat the cycle. We did two a day; each predicted the temperature and pressure up to the (moving) shock wave after one more time step - a millisecond. Allowing for the fact that we did not work Sundays, that was 50,400,000 times as slow as the real atomic explosion! A Cray 2 today would be ten million times faster - and give you Saturday off besides!
About von Neumann's warning: he instantly realized that Eckert and I were experts only on numerical solutions of systems of ordinary differential equations, which are central to all the problems of celestial mechanics. I had had a good course in quantum theory in graduate school, but no practice in solving those kinds of partial differential equations numerically. Nor had Eckert; in fact, nobody had - solutions took much more computing power than the physicists were accustomed to in 1940.
The little group of Giant Brains at Los Alamos, especially Feynman and the card pushers, had learned from Johnnie and from sad experience that if a certain ratio of distance interval to time interval was exceeded, the numbers went wild. I was told to check after each time step to make sure that ratio was still all right - a minor desk calculator operation. One of our new hires, a bluestocking named Liz Ward, did our desk calculator work. After figuring out where the shock wave had gotten to, she did the little ratio calculation carefully, but neglected to report to Marjorie or to me when the ratio went bad. And I didn't look over her shoulder: mea culpa!
So I had to get on the telephone to Johnnie and confess we had blown two cycles - a day's work. "Dr. von Neumann, suppose I run a smoothing operation to get rid of the ripples? Will it distort what follows?" "That will make a nice dissertation topic in applied mathematics after the war, Grosch. Meanwhile, to be safe, do the last three time steps over." And there went Sunday!
[-31-] Eckert and I had clearances, and access to that safe. McPherson had even higher clearances - IBM was involved in cryptography, for instance - but no need to know. The machine room gang had none, although they did know they were doing something very important. Oh, and the listings I mailed to Los Alamos had no hand-written labels, but matched a labeled master copy that had been carried back by Feynman: primitive but exceedingly effective security.
Then it was August 6, and the radio and the newspapers told us about Hiroshima. We knew what we had been working on, and that tens of thousands of Japanese civilians had been incinerated. Before the moral pressures could mount, events swept us away. The war in the Pacific ended, the war in Europe ended. All our perspectives lengthened overnight - from a few months "to the end of the war," to the long reaches of peace.
In Chapter 04 you will encounter
(in order of appearance):
The Great Depression dominated the American scene until Pearl Harbor
Parents [Mabel and Bert Grosch] produced a hatchling in Saskatchewan
Saskatoon the Central Hospital got an incubator in early 1918
Andrew Booth built a drum computer at Birkbeck College, London
Canadian schools skipped the bright kids ahead
Mrs. Linhart we started the Science Club together in Toledo
"Benjamin Franklin" [play] turned out I was a born ham
Early heroes: Ozma, Dr. Doolittle and Captain Nemo no computers yet
AMAZING STORIES Buck Rogers and his flying belt, on a 1928 cover
H.G. Wells I knew at twelve why "cavorite" was impossible
Edgar Rice Burroughs but I had hopes for Deja Thoris
The Toledo Museum of Art the collections were better than the classes
Sex even the juvenile form was great stuff
High school mathematics flying solo in calculus was too difficult
High school debating a big thing in Michigan and the Middle West
High school chemistry Mr. Erickson had an unofficial lab assistant
The Detroit Public Library an adult permit for a persuasive 13-year-old
Graduation [Royal Oak Senior High School] at fifteen, but not a monster
Albion College offered a debating [!] scholarship
University of Michigan [Ann Arbor] offered a tuition scholarship
Going steady "meager sensual pleasures"
[-33-] After almost five years of war, peace was a stranger. And I did not remember it all that fondly, especially when I thought back before my college years. The Great Depression had been pretty awful for a youngster, especially near Detroit, where the clang of closing factory doors was nastily punctuated by the splat! of defenestrated bankers.
My parents, Bessie Mabel Adams ("Mabel") and Reuben John Grosch ("Bert", since his father had also been Reuben), had emigrated from England to Western Canada. They were both Londoners - Walthamstovians, and from large families. Dad had been apprenticed as a cabinetmaker, and retained the skills all his life - made very handsome violins as a hobby during the Evil Thirties. The rather Germanic name stretched back through a line of furniture makers, perhaps to the Hanover accession with its train of tradesmen - always in the London suburbs. Dad broke the pattern; came out to Saskatchewan as a construction carpenter, and sent for Mabel as soon as he had his feet under him. They were married in 1912. I was born in Saskatoon in 1918 in Caesarean style, and survived only because the Central Hospital had just added an incubator to its equipment. Not surprisingly, I remained the only child.
We moved steadily eastward in the next years. When I finally got back to my birthplace fifty years later, I asked my hosts to drive me past the hospital to see if there was a plaque to their first (and presumably most famous) incubator baby; alas! they had torn the place down. My host, Andy Booth, ex-Birkbeck College, London, and builder of the first British drum computer, claimed they had sown salt in the ashes!
I went to school in Ontario; first in Chatham, then in Windsor. Canadian schools did not, at least in those less-U.S.-influenced days, let a student sit [-34-] idle; I spent one semester in each grade and ended up three years ahead of myself. I remember only one teacher clearly. The provincial government was instituting French classes as I was zooming through the sixth grade [1928], and I can still sing a few phrases about the bridge of Avignon.
My father had been inside superintendent and senior detailer for a Detroit fine-woodworking company, commuting across the river each day. He was offered a better job in Toledo, Ohio, and worked there for a few months while coming home to Windsor on weekends - via interurban trolley, today only a hobbyist's dream. He persuaded Mabel to put away her English preferences and emigrate yet again.
Parenthetically, he soon became a U.S. citizen, and conferred the same citizenship on me by the derivative route, but my mother remained a determined British subject. George V and George VI were much more real to her than our all-enveloping FDR. Yet although she corresponded copiously with relatives and friends in England from 1912 until her death in 1962, she never showed the slightest interest in going back to visit the country that seemed to hold her loyalties.
I started the seventh grade at Alexander Hamilton Junior High School in Toledo, a few days before my tenth birthday. The teachers were dubious, especially when they found that I believed the Canadians had won the War of 1812! Within a month or two the science teacher, Mrs. Linhart, and I had started the school's first Science Club. A few weeks more and I was writing for the school paper, usually the province of the eighth graders. My English teacher, Miss Morgan, reported to Mother that she wanted to hug me, and to shake my head off, on alternate days - an emotion shared often in later years by a long string of wives, managers and friends.
In the spring rehearsals began for the Annual Play, customarily dominated by the older grade. But this year the staff had chosen "Benjamin Franklin", which required a smallish boy to be on stage continuously, gabbling away the while. Guess who was the only boy in AH that could memorize the part?
I loved it - loved being up there in front of those kids and teachers and parents, the center of all attention. It turned out that in spite of my glasses, and my reading, and my science club, and my good grades, I was a Born Ham.
The previous August I had persuaded my dubious father to buy me my first AMAZING STORIES, the pioneer Gernsback science fiction magazine, which I read without missing an issue for over a dozen years. Twenty five cents, it cost, and had a drawing of Jupiter as seen from Ganymede on the cover, and the original Buck Rogers story ("Armageddon, 2419 A.D.") inside. I had started with the Oz books at five, and Dr. Doolittle; then Verne; then a heavy dose of mythology - Greek, Roman, Norse, even Hindu. Well before my tenth birthday I was off into space!
AMAZING led me to Wells and Burroughs, and a year or two later the first issues of ASTOUNDING appeared on the newsstands, with science as well as fiction. Perhaps more importantly, I graduated from the primarily juvenile library collection in the basement of the Toledo school, to an adult public library, and later to the large main Detroit Public Library. Reading had to be the prime resource of a boy three years younger and a head shorter than his classmates.
One of my teachers got me enrolled in a Saturday class at the very good Toledo Museum of Art, and I liked it. But I really wasn't much at fine arts, and enjoyed wandering among the collections more than being creative with pen and brush. A modern color graphics terminal would have helped, of course.
And I discovered sex. Given my social disabilities, it didn't involve girls or women, or even boy friends [-35-] - just what the Victorians rightly called "solitary" and wrongly called "vice". I was barely ten. I thought it was terrific. Not one day has passed since that first wonderful discovery without my wishing for or planning for - or on good days, experiencing - the manifold pleasures of sex.
The company Dad had worked for in Detroit, a private outfit named Moynes, which did fancy churches and Grosse Pointe mansions and lots of circular staircases, wanted him back, and came down to Toledo and said so. This was 1930; in the Fifties and Sixties, when I was asked back for second hitches by IBM and GE and Uncle Sam, I often thought of his experience. He was flattered, as I was later; he accepted. We moved to a convenient Detroit suburb, Royal Oak, and I entered the ninth grade at the senior high school. I was barely twelve. The Great Depression was only a few months away. I don't remember much about mathematics in Windsor or Toledo. Skipping ahead as I did, I missed whole chunks of arithmetic and only noticed it once, when a review examination revealed I had never had decimals! I did the whole exam on the assumption that 6.28 meant 6 and 1/28th, got an abysmal grade, and discovered the right system by myself, in a week or two. The teacher never knew.
At Royal Oak I took considerable pleasure in algebra and geometry, and was so expert that in my senior year I sometimes sat in as instructor for the freshman algebra teacher's last class while he coached football. At the end of my second year my geometry teacher, Miss Gibson, who was to teach junior-year algebra, gave me the next textbook to work over during the long summer vacation, graded my problems and administered a mini-final examination in October, and excused me from classes. In my senior year we did solid geometry in the fall and trigonometry in the spring; the latter introduced me to logarithms, and I spent many hours in class - while the others sweated - building a better seven-place table from a curious book I got from the town library which had accurate logs, but of prime numbers only.
From that same library - adult side, but they had lots of Jules Verne on the juvenile side! - I got the Granville Smith and Longley calculus text which turned out next year to be used in my college class. I tried to master it on my own, but stuck at the approach to the limit idea. I asked my trig teacher, Miss Kirk, for help, only to learn she had never had calculus and taught her "advanced" classes by rote. I was disillusioned.
On the Ham side, I soon discovered debating, a big thing in that part of the Middle West, with a statewide competition among high schools each year and even college scholarships similar to but less plush than those for football and basketball stars. But it was the public-appearance thing I enjoyed, especially when it involved a trip to another high school, and a fresh audience. I soon became the expert rebutter and "closer", much improved the Royal Oak standing in the state, and captained the squad my senior year.
On the science side, I became unofficial lab assistant in chemistry, had the [-36-] complete run of the shop for two years while the teacher, Mr. Erickson, very good indeed but also busy coaching track, watched my struggles to do primitive qualitative analysis without a good balance (I remember making standard solutions with constant-boiling hydrochloric acid and lots of pipette/burette work).
My father cut into a gas line at home and inserted the appropriate fixture so I could have a Bunsen burner instead of an alcohol lamp. I did the usual dangerous flashlight powder/ thermite/ gunpowder experiments in our back yard, and decided to be a research chemist. All this was amplified by a steady flow of books from the big Detroit Public Library, for which I managed to promote an adult permit on the strength of Dad's employment a few blocks away. I was then just thirteen, but persuasive!
Physics was a bust. Astronomy I studied out of AMAZING and ASTOUNDING, plus dull books from my three libraries (there was a rather good library in the high school also). I didn't confuse the sources; I already understood at twelve or thirteen that H.G. Wells' "cavorite", which took his confused heroes to the Moon, was an impossibility - and why.
This is a good place to explain why I flourished so early, and yet didn't turn into some kind of a monster. I was immersed in a rather ordinary environment - good schools, good teachers, but nothing like the Bronx High School of Science, or the Cambridge or Pasadena hotbeds. And everything was seriously damped by the Depression, which was raging with special virulence in the Detroit area. That meant no travel, very little spending money, very few purchased books, and at school very limited equipment.
On the other hand, my parents and all my teachers were enormously supportive. The former never really understood what I did after I finished high school, but they were proud of my honors and my Ph.D. and my mysterious jobs. They watched me as Benjamin Franklin and as debating captain, came to all the school events - but shunned the PTA. My teachers were no great minds, but they worked far harder, especially on me and the other bright kids, than they would today; teaching was still honored in Canada, and a stable and fairly well-paid job in Toledo and Royal Oak - and the Depression sharpened their appreciation.
Of course it seemed like a struggle at the time, and I had occasional setbacks and social disfunctions, but compared to most youngsters in those Depression years I had a red-carpet path. My debating coach, Miss Moore, got me the offer of a scholarship at Albion College;