CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I Alone Am Left to Tell Thee

EVEN THOUGH THE FINAL DAYS of the Mathematical Tables Project were filled with drama and emotion, and even though they engaged an unusual cast of characters, they were nonetheless part of a conventional scientific decision. Two scientists, each seeing a different direction for a project, shared a common claim over a single pool of resources. One of the two, John Curtiss, ultimately prevailed and steered the course of the Mathematical Tables Project to his liking. At the end, no one questioned the credentials of the loser, Arnold Lowan, or thought that he was unfit to lead a computing group or believed that he was incapable of developing new methods of scientific calculation. Most of the American computing groups of the Second World War ended in such a manner. As the country returned to the peacetime economy, the government reduced the budget for scientific and engineering research. In response, the leaders of the research laboratories, with or without an argument, cut their staffs, including their human computers.

As a world war gave place to a cold war, the United States began to rebuild and expand its research laboratories. The navy supported science through its Office of Naval Research. The air force created a private research company in California, the RAND Corporation. A dozen universities created laboratories in order to provide research services to the military. Of these laboratories, the only facility to develop a large computing staff was the one devoted to the mathematical methods of computation, the Institute for Numerical Analysis at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).¹ The institute, a division of the National Bureau of Standards, did much productive work during a period of controversy and criticism. This criticism was not concerned with the quality of work done at the Institute for Numerical Analysis or the need for standard methods of computation or even the proper allocation of the institute’s budget. It touched on the right of the institute’s staff to claim the title of scientist and to hold stewardship over the country’s scientific legacy. This criticism came not from within the family but from without, not from the greater community of scientists but from the American public. At the center of this criticism was a quiet but ambitious human computer, the former technical leader of the Mathematical Tables Project, Gertrude Blanch.

In the spring of 1948, Gertrude Blanch was having no part of Arnold Lowan’s confrontation with John Curtiss. While Lowan was rallying the supporters of the Mathematical Tables Project, Blanch was quietly going about her business. In earlier years, she might have avoided the controversy by disappearing into John von Neumann’s test of linear programming, but she needed no such excuse this time, as she was shortly to depart for California. Curtiss had asked her to be the assistant director for computation at the Institute for Numerical Analysis, a position that would oversee a computing office and engage in some mathematical research. She viewed the new job as an opportunity to move away from Lowan’s shadow and establish her own reputation. Already she was preparing articles for Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation and talks for the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, a new society for those interested in electronic computers.²

Blanch spent the month of April cleaning her desk, packing her books, and retrieving those few trinkets that reminded her of all that the Mathematical Tables Project had accomplished. On her last day, the computers took a break from their linear programming calculations and gave her a farewell party. Surrounded by adding machines and piles of paper, they shared one last plate of food with Blanch, offered her a parting gift, and left her a card expressing their best wishes for her future. The computers came from the working-class neighborhoods around New York City: Brooklyn, Yonkers, Jersey City, the Bronx, Harlem, and the Lower East Side.³ A few of them would be offered positions in Washington, D.C., but most would soon be looking for work in New York. None of them would be following Blanch.

At the start of May, Blanch emptied her apartment and said good-bye to her sister and to her nephews and nieces. She had no family of her own to keep her in New York, no man to tie her heart to Brooklyn, at least none that had been discovered in a routine security check.⁴ Her train took three days to make the trip to California, time that would allow her to think about the future as the scenery went past the windows. The train lingered by the stockyards of Chicago before passing through the farms of Iowa and climbing the Rocky Mountains. She had been west once before, a visit to relatives in Mexico, but this trip was a fundamental change in her life. She was leaving her friends and her home to pursue one of the new opportunities that had been created for American scientists. There was more than a little risk in the trip, as the United States Congress had become more willing to support scientific research but had not entirely determined how the institutions of democracy should interact with scientists and scientific laboratories. The Research Board for National Security had failed in its first year and had not been replaced. The National Bureau of Standards was acting as the interim coordinator of postwar research.⁵

Blanch was more concerned with personal issues than with national policy. She was nearing her fiftieth birthday, and she truly wanted to make a mark on the world. The war had brought many women into science, but only a few of them were finding a place in the time of peace. Ida Rhodes and Irene Stegun, both members of the Mathematical Tables Project planning committee, had jobs at the National Bureau of Standards. Mina Rees, the assistant to Warren Weaver, had found a good position with the Office of Naval Research. Grace Hopper, the Vassar professor who had “considerable experience” with computing machines, had received a commission in the navy and was making her career in the laboratory of Howard Aiken. Blanch believed that the Institute for Numerical Analysis would be her intellectual home. John Curtiss had told her that it would function like an academic research department, “a group of peers working together as a university,”⁶ though Curtiss had clearly indicated that the institute would be “a computing service containing both standard equipment and high speed equipment” for the aircraft industry of Southern California.⁷ As she approached Los Angeles, she must have pondered her new role. Would she be able to pursue her own research, or would she spend her days doing calculations for others? Would she have a place of her own, or would she always be subservient to someone else? At the end of her career, would she be able to leave a legacy for others to follow, or would she have been more productive if she had never left that well-appointed photographic equipment office and taken a job in a work relief agency?

Blanch found a new apartment across the street from the UCLA campus, a short walk from her office. The Institute for Numerical Analysis was housed in an old rehabilitation hospital, a temporary wooden structure that had been constructed during the war. The building, which was only a single story tall, was located in an undeveloped section of the campus. When she first entered the institute building, in May 1948, Blanch encountered a scene reminiscent of the first days of the Mathematical Tables Project. The building was empty except for a corner office that was occupied by the institute’s administrator, Albert Cahn. The computing office was an open room furnished with large tables. The computers would be able to open the windows to catch the breezes from the ocean or work outside on a central veranda that looked across the scrub growth toward the west.

The institute administrator, Albert Cahn, was no Arnold Lowan and had no authority over the scientific work of the organization. He handled correspondence for the institute, managed the organization’s money, and promoted the new computing service.⁸ In later years, the staff of the institute would tell the story that Cahn had been hired for the new institute because he had been found “sleeping in a common room at Princeton [University] without a job.”⁹ He had spent the war at the Chicago office of the Manhattan Project. Holding only a master’s degree in physics, he had handled the tasks that were too simple, too routine, or too boring for the senior scientists with doctoral degrees. After the war, he had gone in search of an academic position, hoping that the cachet of the atomic bomb would help him find a good job. Receiving no offers, or at least none that interested him, he drifted back to the universities of the East Coast and found his way to Princeton.

Only two other offices were occupied when Blanch arrived. John Todd and Olga Taussky had come from England to be the first visiting mathematicians at the institute. It was “a very welcome and perhaps deserved change,” remarked Taussky. The war had been invigorating and exciting, but it had taken its toll. She had found the demands of maintaining a home to be “rather strong on top of the mathematical activities.”¹⁰ Neither of the two was pleased by the prospects for British mathematics. The Admiralty Computing Service had little to do after the war, and many of its computers were preparing to join a new British national mathematics laboratory. Taussky and Todd were invited to be part of this group, but they “didn’t think much of [the] leadership.”¹¹ Discovering that it would be difficult to start a new research program within the University of London, they accepted an invitation to come to the institute. Much of the institute’s work would be conducted by visitors, such as Todd and Taussky. It would have only eight permanent mathematical staff. The rest would come and go as the institute considered different problems and ideas.¹²

By the end of the summer, Blanch had assembled a computing office that resembled the wartime Mathematical Tables Project. The group was “founded partly on the older hand-machine techniques,” observed the institute director, “and partly on theories radically new in numerical analysis.”¹³ It had sixteen computers, seven men and nine women, who had been recruited from the students of UCLA and the residents of West Los Angeles.¹⁴ They had electric desk calculators, machines that could multiply and divide as well as add and subtract. They also had an accounting machine that they could use as a difference engine. Their first project was a new variation on the classical calculations of comet orbits, which had been requested by the U.S. Army. The army was building upon the spoils it had seized at the German rocket research center of Peenemünde and was developing a new generation of high-performance rockets. The work was still in its preliminary stages, but army officers were already thinking about the difficulties of boosting a payload beyond the atmosphere. To prepare for the time when they could put a satellite in outer space, they requested tables of “rocket and comet orbits” from Blanch’s computers.¹⁵

43. John Todd, Olga Taussky, and John Curtiss on excursion from Institute for Numerical Analysis

Most members of the institute staff believed that the human computers would be temporary workers, quickly replaced by a new “automatic computing machine,” as electronic computers were then called. Initially, the National Bureau of Standards intended to purchase a computing machine for the Institute for Numerical Analysis. Three American companies were offering to build such machines: Raytheon Corporation of Massachusetts, Electronic Research Associates of Minnesota, and UNIVAC Corporation of Pennsylvania, which had been formed by the ENIAC designers, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. John Curtiss was not satisfied with any of these proposals and convinced the senior staff at the bureau that the Institute for Numerical Analysis should build its own machine. He argued that a machine could be built quickly and that it would develop improved computing technologies.¹⁶

Under the best of circumstances, a speedy construction would take two or even three years after the first designers arrived at UCLA. To provide an interim machine-computing service, the institute acquired a device called the Card-Programmed Calculator. The Card-Programmed Calculator stood halfway between the IBM punched card tabulators and the new electronic computers. It had been created by engineers at an IBM customer, Northrop Aircraft Company. The engineers had recognized that they could create a fairly powerful computing device by connecting a new IBM card tabulator to one of the company’s accounting machines. IBM had not intended for the machines to be joined in this fashion, but they quickly realized the value of the combination and adopted it as an official product. They eventually leased about 700 of these machines, far more than any of their early electronic computers.¹⁷

By the fall of 1948, the institute was offering computing services with the Card-Programmed Calculator to both academic researchers and commercial firms in California, including aircraft manufacturers and oil companies. Within six months, Albert Cahn could report that “calls upon this service are such that the facility has been expanded to almost double the size contemplated when the institute was established.”¹⁸ Originally, the new calculating machine was overseen by one of Blanch’s computers, a woman named Roselyn Seidel, but with the increased demands, the leaders of the National Bureau of Standards wanted the device to be managed by someone experienced with punched card machines.¹⁹ After brief negotiations, John Curtiss convinced Everett Yowell to leave Columbia University and join the Institute for Numerical Analysis. The mathematical staff considered Yowell a “significant appointment” to the institute, but Yowell recalled that the human computers were less enthusiastic. “Ros [Seidel] was not happy to have me hired over her.”²⁰

The Card-Programmed Calculator was not a full electronic computer, though it was a considerable improvement over the old punched card tabulators. Using special punched cards and an IBM plugboard, an operator could instruct the machine to undertake a complicated series of operations. It also had an electronic memory that could store forty-eight numbers of ten digits each.²¹ With this memory, the machine could handle small simultaneous equation problems, such as the least squares calculations that had stymied George Snedecor at Iowa State University twenty years before. However, the new machine could not handle large problems, including the one that had appeared in the Mathematical Tables Project test of linear programming.

Some simultaneous equation calculations posed unusual problems for Blanch’s computers. On these calculations, the computers could follow every step of the computing plan, check the work with a desk calculator to ensure than every step was done properly, and still produce values that were wildly incorrect. Though some blamed the computing plan, Blanch discovered a difficulty that would eventually be called “ill conditioning.” Ill-conditioned simultaneous equation problems are fundamentally unstable, just as a coin balanced on its edge is unstable. Rounding the values of an ill-conditioned problem, a simple and innocuous act, can cause the calculation to collapse into a meaningless mess of figures. The only way to fix this problem is to reorganize the computing plan, producing a plan that is algebraically equivalent to the original calculation but avoids certain combinations of the four arithmetic operations.²²

During the construction of the new machine, the mathematicians at the institute started exploring computing techniques that were difficult to do by hand. They experimented with linear programming and invited John von Neumann to visit the institute. Another mathematician developed “relaxation techniques,” computing methods that began with a rough guess of the final answer and then slowly adjusted that guess. Many at the institute became interested in “Monte Carlo” techniques, methods that used random numbers to calculate answers.²³ The institute computers worked on such calculations as best they could, though they could rarely handle a large problem. The staff never developed the kind of computing skill that was found at the Mathematical Tables Project, as few computers stayed at the institute for more than a year. The rapid departure of human computers never seemed to bother the mathematicians, as they were looking ahead to the new computing machine.²⁴

The electronic computer took three years to complete and went through three changes of name. Employees at the institute called the machine “Zephyr,” after the great western wind, while the staff of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington referred to it as “Sirocco,” the hot air from the desert. Eventually, the two groups settled on the government acronym SWAC, which stood for Standards Western Automatic Computer.²⁵ Though the members of the institute occasionally felt isolated from the academic centers of the East Coast, they generally had no regrets about their distance from Washington. John Todd wrote that a “certain distance from Washington was certainly desirable, for some mathematicians are uncomfortable with strict dress code and regular hours.”²⁶ Their location may have spared them the need to arrive at work at 8:00 in the morning or to wear formal business clothing, but it did not insulate them from the political turmoil of the late 1940s.

The political conflict of this era was rooted in the looming problems of the Cold War, the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, and the frustrations of the Republican Party. The Cold War placed the United States in a contest for global dominance with a frightening and powerful enemy. Roosevelt had reordered the political landscape in a way that kept the Democratic Party in power for over sixteen years. The Republicans, frustrated by the Democratic hold on power, were “traumatized and bitterly divided,” observed the journalist David Halberstam.²⁷ The Republicans had always been a minority party and had held power only by pulling support away from the Democrats. During the period of Republican dominance in the nineteenth century, conservative leaders had often found it useful to discredit Democratic opponents by calling them secessionists, politicians sympathetic to the old Confederate states. Seventy-five years later, a new generation of Republican leaders accused the Democrats of being communists, agents of the Bolshevik revolution, traitors. The fact that some of the Democrats had actually been communists, or at least had been sympathetic to the Soviet Union, bolstered such charges. By the fall of 1949, Republicans equated communism with treason and pointed to the Soviet atomic bomb program for their proof. The Soviet Union had detonated a nuclear weapon on August 29, 1949, an event that surprised American weapons experts.²⁸ Only a few weeks before, the Central Intelligence Agency had predicted “that [a Soviet] atomic bomb cannot be completed before mid-1951.”²⁹

The center of the American political maelstrom was the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee, often called HUAC. It was filled with disaffected Republicans who were either valiantly defending the United States from an insidious enemy or trying to make a name for themselves by pinning the label of communism on public figures, depending upon one’s point of view. The committee investigated the senior members of the Truman administration, the writers, directors, and actors of Hollywood, and the scientists in government service. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee had begun an investigation of Edward Condon, the director of the Bureau of Standards, an investigation that struck uncomfortably close to the Institute for Numerical Analysis.

Condon had liberal inclinations, though he had never been a member of the Communist Party, and he had worked on the atomic bomb during the war. He spent most of the war at the University of California, but he had briefly served at the Los Alamos laboratory. At Los Alamos, he been engaged in “several arguments about security regulations,” according to historian Jessica Wang, and soon resigned his position. In his resignation, he stated his belief that military control of scientific information was impeding work on the bomb. “To his mind, intellectual freedom and international cooperation were intimately linked,” wrote Wang. “Scientific progess required open communications, free from military requirements of secrecy.”³⁰ When the House Un-American Activities Committee learned of Condon’s record at Los Alamos and his support for the open dissemination of atomic research, the committee reviewed his case and declared that Condon was “one of the weakest links in our atomic security.”³¹

In general, the House of Representatives investigated only public figures and senior members of the administration, such as Condon. Junior employees, such as those who worked for the Institute for Numerical Analysis, were investigated by administrative committees that had been established by the Truman administration as a way of deflecting Republican criticism. The committee that oversaw the National Bureau of Standards and the Institute for Numerical Analysis was Department of Commerce Loyalty Board Number Two. In December, this board announced that it would require “pre-appointment loyalty checks of all research associates and guest workers who are located at National Bureau of Standards for more than one week.”³² This order included everyone working at the Institute for Numerical Analysis, the administrative staff, the eight permanent researchers, and the twenty annual visitors.

The first member of the Institute for Numerical Analysis to be called before Department of Commerce Loyalty Board Number Two was the senior administrator, Albert Cahn. No record has been found of Cahn’s case, and all we can do is speculate that Cahn belonged to the broad class of liberal scientists, a group that worried many loyalty investigators. One of the few concrete facts we know of Cahn is that he signed the July 17 Petition, a document drafted by Manhattan Project scientists after the first test of the plutonium bomb. The petition requested that President Truman delay the use of the new weapon.³³ Manhattan Project officials annotated one copy of the petition, indicating whether each signatory was important or unimportant to the project.³⁴ While this act may have brought Cahn to the Loyalty Board, it may also have been only one of several pieces of evidence against him. In all, seventy scientists signed the petition, and some of them were never questioned by an investigative panel.³⁵

After Cahn was summoned before the Loyalty Board, fourteen months passed before his case was decided. The delay did not bode well for him. During this period, Klaus Fuchs confessed to passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union; Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury; Mao Tse-tung and his followers established the People’s Republic of China; Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a rambling but inflammatory speech in which he claimed to have evidence of communists in the State Department; North Korean troops invaded South Korea; and, finally, the FBI arrested Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of spying for the Soviets. When the Loyalty Board finally reviewed Cahn’s case, they concluded that the evidence against Cahn seemed to fit into a broader pattern of threats against the United States. They judged that the institute administrator was a security risk and placed him on administrative leave.³⁶

Following Albert Cahn came Gertrude Blanch. Blanch was especially vulnerable, as she had already failed not one but two security investigations. The first investigation had been conducted in 1942, when the Mathematical Tables Project was certified as an essential relief project. That review had denied her a security clearance. The second investigation had occurred in 1946, when Blanch had been invited to join the computing staff at Los Alamos. In that review, the FBI quickly uncovered the results of the 1942 investigation and declared Blanch untrustworthy. When the administrators of Los Alamos received this verdict, they quietly withdrew their invitation.³⁷ Both of these judgments were part of the record presented to Department of Commerce Loyalty Board Number Two in the spring of 1951. When the board considered her case, they concurred with the earlier decisions and judged her untrustworthy, but before she could be placed on administrative leave, Blanch appealed the ruling and requested a formal hearing before the board. The board accepted her request and scheduled her hearing for May 1952.³⁸

“There are only a few times,” wrote the 1950s sociologist William Whyte, when an individual “can wrench his destiny into his own hands—and if he does not fight then, he will make a surrender that will later mock him.”³⁹ By nature, Gertrude Blanch avoided public confrontations. Her moments of strength were private moments. She had quietly postponed a college education in order to support her mother. She had gently guided the poverty-stricken computers of the Mathematical Tables Project. On at least one occasion, she had stood firm against the bluster of Arnold Lowan. In this last situation, Blanch had to confront the charges against her or surrender her place as a scientist. The case against her was based on the five points that had been identified in 1942. The first three were circumstantial. First, the FBI had an informant who claimed to have seen her purchase a copy of the Daily Worker sometime during the late 1930s. Next, at approximately the same time, the New York office of the WPA identified her as a “Red.” Finally, she had shared an apartment with her sister and brother-in-law, who were open members of the Communist Party. The last two points were harder to dismiss. During the 1930s, Blanch had registered as a member of the Democratic Labor Party, an organization that the FBI claimed was “captured by the Communists.” She had also signed petitions for political candidates who openly identified themselves as communists.⁴⁰

Blanch approached her loyalty hearing with the same logical care that she brought to her computing plans. She knew that she was a minor figure in the drama and would gain nothing from grand statements or denunciations. She could not behave as the author Lillian Hellman had behaved in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and declaim, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”⁴¹ Her best strategy lay in arguing that the charges were false, in showing that she was a valuable government scientist, and in suggesting that there was nothing to gain from dismissing her. She gathered letters of support from her fellow scientists, asking those who knew her personally to attest to her loyalty and her value to the government. She also drafted and redrafted her statement for the board, refining the logic, honing the evidence, creating the kind of defense that only a mathematician could make.

“Let us assume, for a moment,” Blanch began, “that both my sister and my brother-in-law could be called somewhat radically inclined. It does not follow that I, too, must share their views—in fact, the probability is not even high that there is a correlation between their views and mine.” It was not an easy task to dispose of a communist who shared the same parents and who had once shared the same house. By starting with this issue, Blanch risked losing credibility with the board, but if she could make her case, then the rest would be easy to handle. She spent a few minutes discussing her relationship with her sister, commenting on how sisters could be close but have different political opinions, and then moved to the subject of communist periodicals. “I personally do not read the Daily Worker,” she remarked; “the newspaper does not happen to be to my taste, nor does it reflect my political sympathies.” She ignored the issue of her voting registration and would not deny that she had signed petitions, though she admitted only to signing papers that called for the “admittance of Jews to Palestine.” She concluded her presentation by stating, “I think I may say that I am conservative in my tastes, and I have never leaned toward radical movements of any sort.”⁴²

Blanch understood herself well enough to know that she was not a revolutionary and that she preferred to work within existing social structures, even at times like these. If she were a communist, then she was the sort of communist that had been educated at the czar’s expense, a communist who liked nothing better than Western art, music, and theater, a communist who deeply desired to purchase a home of her own. Her most radical idea was the notion that women could be mathematicians, that they could work outside the family, that they could have a role in public affairs. Her presentation was bolstered by interviews with neighbors and coworkers. A few suggested that she might have liberal inclinations, but none questioned her commitment to the United States. When the board passed judgment on her case, they declared that they had “no objection on grounds of Loyalty” to her continued employment at the institute.⁴³ The hearing resolved the charges against Blanch and allowed her to return to her job, but it did not end the threats to the National Bureau of Standards and the Institute for Numerical Analysis.

The Bureau of Standards was attacked in the winter of 1953, after Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated as president and returned the Republican Party to power. The new cabinet member responsible for the National Bureau of Standards, Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, was highly critical of government workers. He frequently spoke of removing employees who were trying to “hamper, hoodwink and wreck the new administration.” He complained about “the theories of foreign socialists” and “the notions of local egg-heads” and finally promised that he was “going to improve the situation by finding means to replace [disloyal employees].”⁴⁴

In the first weeks of his administration, John Curtiss came within Weeks’s sights. Curtiss was an unconventional man, a “bachelor who enjoyed fast cars and plenty of good food and drink,” according to his friend John Todd.⁴⁵ He was known to hold large and boisterous parties in his small apartment. “He invited hundreds (it seemed) of guests,” reported one member of the institute staff, “and one was very lucky if you managed to get inside.”⁴⁶ Behind the flamboyant lifestyle was the suggestion, uncomfortable to the age, that John Curtiss might be a homosexual. Government agencies generally considered such individuals vulnerable to blackmail and hence poor security risks.⁴⁷ In early March, Curtiss was informed that he had been identified as a likely homosexual and that he must choose between a public dismissal and a quiet resignation. His colleagues encouraged him to appeal the ruling. After considering his situation, Curtiss decided to leave quietly. “I have a great desire not to be a cause celebre,” he wrote, and added that he desired to have “a scientific career which will be a little more constructive than that of a professional victim.”⁴⁸

A month after Curtiss left, Secretary Weeks turned on the director of the National Bureau of Standards, a physicist named Allen Astin. Astin had replaced the embattled Edward Condon, who had resigned during his investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Condon “cited his low government salary as his reason for leaving,” observed one historian of Condon’s career, “but more likely the continual burden of having to respond to [the House Un-American Activities Committee] accusations had grown to outweigh the appeal of public service.”⁴⁹

Astin conflicted with Secretary Weeks over an event that was interpreted one way by National Bureau of Standards scientists and quite another way by members of the business community. It concerned a report by bureau scientists on battery additives, chemical mixtures that promised to enhance the performance of automobile batteries. The report reviewed one such additive, called AD-X2, and judged that it had no value.⁵⁰ To the scientists, the report was a simple scientific conclusion. To the manufacturer of AD-X2, the report was unnecessary government interference in the marketplace. The manufacturer found enough sympathetic ears in Congress to provoke a debate on the report and put the National Bureau of Standards on the defensive. Allen Astin supported his scientists, much to the dismay of his boss, Secretary Weeks. Concluding that Astin was just one more example of “deadwood and poison oak,”⁵¹ Weeks asked for his resignation.

Weeks did not anticipate the extent to which the scientific community would fight for its autonomy, its ability to make decisions without external interference. He also did not foresee the scale of political connections that the scientists could rally. The key players were not the scientists in the National Bureau of Standards, who might be expected to resign in protest, but outside researchers with an interest in the agency. The fight was led by the board of visitors, the scientists and industrialists who offered their advice on bureau operations. “The most influential member of the committee, who seemed to have Mr. Weeks’ respect, was Mervyn Kelly, then President of Bell Telephone Laboratories,” recalled Astin.⁵² They also drew support from university presidents, academic scientists, and members of the press, such as Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson.⁵³

Faced with a storm of bad publicity, Weeks asked Astin to return “on a temporary basis.”⁵⁴ Astin used the opportunity to strengthen the hand of bureau scientists. He asked for a full review of the bureau by the National Academy of Sciences. The report, released in the summer of 1953, validated the position of the National Bureau of Standards in the AD-X2 matter, but it concluded that the bureau faced a fundamental conflict between its military research and its civilian duties. It recommended that the bureau return all military-sponsored research to the military agencies. Astin accepted the report and implemented its recommendations. He purged the bureau of all military research, one-third of its budget. The Institute for Numerical Analysis was one of the first units touched by the order. Though the institute appeared to be a civilian laboratory located on a university campus, it was actually financed by money from the air force and the navy. Astin announced that the institute would be closed in June 1954, that its equipment would be given to UCLA, and that its computing staff would be dispersed.⁵⁵

Anticipating the demise of the Institute for Numerical Analysis, Gertrude Blanch resigned her position at the end of 1953. The computing office at the institute had started to shrink even before Astin announced the closure of the UCLA office. The engineers and researchers who needed computing services had begun acquiring calculating equipment of their own. The most common computing machines were the IBM 604 multiplying punch and its near relative, the Card-Programmed Calculator. The larger customers had ordered IBM’s first electronic computer, the Model 701, which had arrived on the market a year before. Fully six of the first twelve customers for the 701 were companies that had once requested computations from the Institute for Numerical Analysis.⁵⁶

Blanch could have sought a position with IBM, a job that probably would have taken her back to New York City, but instead she accepted an offer with the mathematics department of the ElectroData Company. ElectroData was located in nearby Pasadena and proclaimed that “mathematicians are the heroes of the new industrial revolution.”⁵⁷ The firm had been founded by Herbert Hoover and had built electronic instruments during the Second World War. In 1954, it was trying to enter the computer business by building a small machine for engineering applications, the kind of work that was done by the firms that had once patronized the Institute for Numerical Analysis. The company had assembled a talented group of scientists, though none of them belonged to the inner circle of computer designers, the group that could trace their knowledge of computing machines back to the Moore School Lectures of 1946. In addition to Blanch, the office included Clifford Berry, an engineer who had helped John Atanasoff build his computing machine at Iowa State College, and Ted Glaser, a young physicist who was proving to be an exceptional computer scientist even though he had lost his sight as a child.⁵⁸

The winter of 1954 was a poor time to be a government scientist and an equally inauspicious moment to join a small and inexperienced computer company. The managers of ElectroData were struggling to control the design of the machine, to keep the project on schedule, and to develop a customer base. Shortly after Blanch arrived at the company, the senior managers realized that their company needed computer programmers more than it needed mathematicians, and they replaced the “Mathematics Department” with the “Technical Services Group.”⁵⁹ After a couple of weeks on the job, Blanch concluded that “the place in Pasadena wouldn’t last too long,” but she did not know where she might find another job.⁶⁰ Most of the old computing groups had been closed, and their leaders had retired. The dean of human computers, L. J. Comrie, had died. R. C. Archibald had resigned from Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation.⁶¹ H. T. Davis was preparing a final volume of mathematics tables, but his numbers had been calculated by his National Youth Administration computers and did not represent contemporary work. Clara Froelich had left Bell Telephone Laboratories, said good-bye to calculation, and departed for an extended vacation in Mexico.⁶²

For Blanch, one of the few benefits of working for ElectroData was the contact it gave her with air force scientists. The company was a contractor for the air force and worked with many scientists who had known Blanch at the Institute for Numerical Analysis or the Mathematical Tables Project. One of these scientists was Knox Milsaps, the chief mathematician of the air force and a founder of the new Aerospace Research Laboratories at Wright Field in Ohio. During the war, Milsaps had worked with Blanch on several mathematical problems, notably one with an expression called the Mathieu function. In the winter of 1954, he was a regular visitor to the ElectroData offices, as he was planning on purchasing one of the new machines for the aerospace laboratories. As he passed through the building, he would often stop at Blanch’s desk, chat about old times, ask about her new work, and inquire, “When are you coming to Wright Field?” At first, she deflected his questions. She was happy in California, and after her appearance before the Department of Commerce Loyalty Board, she was reluctant to expose herself to another security examination. Yet Milsaps was persistent, ElectroData was in financial turmoil, and Blanch recognized that her job was not interesting. “So one night I faced the floor,” she recalled, “and decided to accept the job in Wright Field.”⁶³

While Blanch prepared to move to Ohio, the FBI began one more review of her background. The agents in charge of her case found the results of the earlier investigations and decided that they should reopen each of the charges. In addition to the five issues that had been dismissed by the Loyalty Board, they requested a study of one more concern: “Subject is not known to be married or have ever been married.”⁶⁴ By this time, the political wars of the early 1950s were starting to wane. The Republicans were more comfortable with power, and the most violent of the anticommunist voices had lost some of their control over the public and their party. The Washington FBI office rejected the request, stating that a new investigation would have a “greater possibility of embarrassment to the Bureau … than [of] attaining any information of value from the subject.”⁶⁵ They formally closed her file and granted Blanch the full security clearance needed for her work. She moved to Dayton, became head of mathematical research at the laboratory, and “learned to drive on icy streets the same as everybody else.”⁶⁶

Before Gertrude Blanch could settle in Dayton, before she could buy a house and learn the neighborhoods, she was contacted by Phil Morse about a project that he called the “handbook for the ordinary computer.”⁶⁷ Morse had concluded that the new electronic computers would be of little help to his generation of scientists and engineers. He speculated that a decade would pass before the typical scientist would have easy access to them. From observing the machines at MIT, he had learned that “programming took weeks, not minutes,” and that small and midsized problems could be handled much more quickly by hand.⁶⁸ Morse told Blanch that he wanted to hold a conference to discuss such computing problems and asked who should be invited to it. Blanch gave him a long list of “tablemakers,” as she described the computers, who worked at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, the navy’s proving ground at Dahlgren, Virginia, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the University of Illinois, though she was quick to characterize one Illinois faculty member as “anti-table.”⁶⁹ She did not list Arnold Lowan, as she was not quite sure how he would feel about the invitation. Lowan had already received an invitation from Morse and had replied that “my chief interest in the conference in mathematical tables derives from the assumption that perhaps it is still possible to bring to life the ‘Math Tables Project’ in New York.”⁷⁰ After Morse explained that he had no interest in reviving the Mathematical Tables Project, Lowan declined to come.

When the conference met in September 1954, most of those in attendance were senior computers of the Second World War: Gertrude Blanch, John Todd, Milton Abramowitz, and even Blanch’s former critic Wallace J. Eckert, who had become an employee of the IBM Corporation. The list also included Nicholas Metropolis from the Manhattan Project; John Tukey, one of the Applied Mathematics Panel mathematicians from Princeton; and the recently fired John Curtiss, who had a temporary job at New York University. Adele Goldstine, who had worked with the computers at the University of Pennsylvania, came only as a spouse. Morse had invited her husband, Herman, because of his contributions to the ENIAC.⁷¹

As they discussed the problems of midsized calculations, the conference members quickly agreed that they needed to produce a book containing “tables of usually encountered functions” as well as graphs, mathematical analyses, and “other techniques useful to the occasional computer.”⁷² They gave the project a shorthand name, the “new Jahnke-Emde,” a term which referred to the book Funktionentafeln mit Formeln und Kurven (Tables of Functions with Formulae and Curves), by Eugen Jahnke and Fritz Emde.⁷³ This book was nearly fifty years old but remained popular with those who worked with applied mathematics.⁷⁴ Twice during the 1940s, the National Bureau of Standards had suggested revising the book. The first time, in 1941, the bureau was preparing for war and could not find the money for a revision. The second time, in 1947, bureau scientists were organizing their new applied mathematics laboratory and were confidently predicting that the electronic computer would remove the need for such a book. Seven years later, when questioned by Phil Morse, the leaders of the bureau acknowledged that the electronic computers were not the solution to all calculating problems and that they could find some money for a new Jahnke and Emde.⁷⁵ The book would be prepared by the bureau’s Computation Laboratory and would be edited by Milton Abramowitz and Irene Stegun, two of Blanch’s closest lieutenants from the Mathematical Tables Project. It would contain twenty-two chapters, each written by a different volunteer. As the conference came to a close, Blanch agreed to write a chapter on Mathieu functions. After a little prodding, the sulking Arnold Lowan agreed to contribute a chapter as well.⁷⁶

The project was formally named the Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables, but the mathematicians who worked on the book usually called it “the handbook” or “AMS 55,” after its place in the National Bureau of Standards publication list, or “Abramowitz and Stegun,” after its editors. Milton Abramowitz did the bulk of the preliminary work and recruited most of the contributors, but he died on a hot and sticky July day in 1957, when he imprudently attempted to mow his lawn in suburban Washington, D.C.⁷⁷ Irene Stegun retrieved the plans for the book from her partner’s desk and finished the project. She corresponded with the contributors, corrected their chapters, and slowly pulled the material into a complete reference work.

The handbook required a decade to complete, a decade that marked a radical change in the electronic computer. In 1954, computers were handcrafted devices that could be found only in government laboratories and large businesses. By 1964, the year of the book’s publication, computers were standard products that could be purchased from a dozen different vendors. The actual date of publication coincided with the announcement of the IBM System 360, a family of machines that IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson Jr. proudly called “the most significant product announcement in IBM history.”⁷⁸ The System 360 would anchor IBM’s product line for twenty-five years and would move computing into offices and laboratories that had never had access to the machines of 1954.⁷⁹ To those who were promoting the new electronic computers, the Handbook of Mathematical Functions seemed an anachronism, a tool for modern science that had been produced by the old human computers. Scientific calculation had become a small part of the subject known as computer science. Computer scientists were increasingly interested in databases, sorting methods, the manipulation of text, and the representation of human reasoning. The tables and formulas of the handbook appealed only to a small group of computer researchers.

Though it no longer represented the central issues in computation, the Handbook of Mathematical Functions ultimately validated the vision of Phil Morse. Neither the IBM 360 nor any of the other machines announced in 1964 was able to handle all of the small and midsized scientific computations that were found at universities and government research labs. Scientists, still having to do some calculations by hand, turned to the contents of the handbook for assistance. They gave good reviews to the book and purchased copy after copy for their laboratories. Within a few years, it became the most widely circulated scientific text ever published.⁸⁰ “I don’t know what I’d do without it,” wrote Blanch, who called it “one of the books I would keep, if I go anywhere, even if I don’t look at it again.”⁸¹

The Handbook sat on Blanch’s desk until she left government service in 1967. It stayed with her in retirement as she wrote a textbook on calculation. In spite of her prediction, it was not taken on her tours of Europe, though one can easily imagine her discussing references to the book with her traveling companion, Ida Rhodes. It was found in her personal effects after her death. As she looked back on her career, the Handbook of Mathematical Functions was the symbol of all that she had accomplished. It appeared at the perihelion of her time in government service, her moment at the center of power. She had just finished a successful decade with the Aerospace Research Laboratories. She had published twenty mathematical papers, been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, been promoted to the highest rank possible for a government scientist, and been publicly recognized for her contributions to the air force.⁸² Blanch had even learned a little about electronic computers, though she was never interested in programming. Programming could be left to assistants. As a newspaper article described her, Blanch was “the brain behind the mechanical brain,”⁸³ but a photo taken at the same time shows her glowering at a new electronic computer.

44. Gertrude Blanch and the electronic computer

45. Gertrude Blanch and President Lyndon Johnson

On March 3, 1964, just a few weeks before the Handbook was released to the public, Gertrude Blanch arrived at the White House in Washington, D.C., wearing the finest of her clothes and the tallest of shoes. Along with five other women, she was ushered through the east entrance, escorted down a long hallway, and asked to wait in a small public room with a presidential photographer and a few representatives of the press. President Lyndon Johnson soon walked into the room, greeted the women, and took his place at a podium. “I believe a woman’s place is not only in the home,” he began, “but also in the House and Senate.”⁸⁴ Blanch and the other five women glanced at each other and smiled knowingly. None of them held an elective office, but all of them served in government. They had come to the White House as part of Lyndon Johnson’s tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt, who had died the prior November. Johnson had wanted to emphasize the impact of the former First Lady by honoring six distinguished women in government service who had begun their careers when Roosevelt lived in the White House.⁸⁵ After the speech, Johnson moved around the room and shook the hands of his honored guests. He paused briefly with Gertrude Blanch, bending over to share a word or two. Like Blanch, he had started his professional career at a work relief agency. Between 1935 and 1937, he had served as director for the Texas office of the National Youth Administration and had distributed research funds to the universities of his state. Had there been more time for president and mathematician to speak, they might have found that they shared much in common, but Johnson quickly strode out of the room and vanished down the hall that led to the Oval Office.

From the White House, a car carried Blanch to a Washington air force base, where a dinner had been prepared in her honor. There, amidst friends and colleagues, she relaxed and smiled and danced. These were rare expressions of emotion for one who kept herself under tight discipline. That night, she enjoyed herself as if the whole world moved in orbit around her, for she had heard her president commend her as the top mathematician in the air force, as a founder of the scientific discipline called numerical analysis, as a patriotic citizen who had served in time of war for the Applied Mathematics Panel, as Gertrude Blanch, who had once worked for the WPA and had once managed a staff of human computers.