Friday, July 22, 2005
Folliculators
The Christian Science Monitor recently carried a review of David Alan Grier's (not that one) new book When Computers Were Human:
Though male scientists deemed creative mathematics beyond feminine abilities, they saw women as perfect for this kind of numerical needlework. One even measured computing time in "girl hours": A complex calculation might even require "kilo-girl-hours.".... Grier tells the tale of these human drudges of mathematical calculation. They came in with the 18th-century Industrial Revolution and quickly disappeared in the mid-20th as electronic computers proved to be faster and, eventually, more reliable.
One of the odder facts that stuck in my head after reading Doron Swade's The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer was that many human computers in Britain in the early 1800s were former hairdressers who had fled the French Revolution. I still can't figure out what on earth led from the one profession to the other. A fondness for symmetry, perhaps?
Incidentally, Swade's book is unique in that he built a working Babbage Difference Engine for the Science Museum in London -- a feat Babbage himself never managed. The thing's a monster, and marvellously impressive, though when I stopped by to see it the gears were frozen and the Engine half-disassembled for repairs.
So it really is the forefather of modern computers....
Though male scientists deemed creative mathematics beyond feminine abilities, they saw women as perfect for this kind of numerical needlework. One even measured computing time in "girl hours": A complex calculation might even require "kilo-girl-hours.".... Grier tells the tale of these human drudges of mathematical calculation. They came in with the 18th-century Industrial Revolution and quickly disappeared in the mid-20th as electronic computers proved to be faster and, eventually, more reliable.
One of the odder facts that stuck in my head after reading Doron Swade's The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer was that many human computers in Britain in the early 1800s were former hairdressers who had fled the French Revolution. I still can't figure out what on earth led from the one profession to the other. A fondness for symmetry, perhaps?
Incidentally, Swade's book is unique in that he built a working Babbage Difference Engine for the Science Museum in London -- a feat Babbage himself never managed. The thing's a monster, and marvellously impressive, though when I stopped by to see it the gears were frozen and the Engine half-disassembled for repairs.
So it really is the forefather of modern computers....
