Wallace J. Eckert.
"The Printing of Mathematical Tables."
Printed in Mathematical Tables and other Aids to Computation (MTAC), volume II, number 17, January 1947. The issue: pp197-228, with the Eckert article occupying pp 197-202, with one photographic illustration. Very nice, fresh copy in the original wrappers, the previous owner's name rubber stamped twice on front cover top and bottom. $700
"From 1940 to 1944 Eckert served as director of the United States Nautical Almanac Office (USNAO) at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., where he set up a computation laboratory similar to the one he had left at Columbia. One of his chief tasks at the USNAO was to develop and compute tables for the American Air Almanac, a navigational tool used by the United States armed forces. Eckert devised punched-card methods of generating the tables and a mechanical method of proofreading, using the comparing device on the punched-card reproducer, that insured the absolute accuracy of the tables. These methods are outlined in Eckert's paper, which also contains his account of an improved table-printing machine designed by IBM and installed in February 1945” (Hook and Norman, 577).
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