JF Ptak Science Books

"Hand it Over to the Machine" (1878)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2742

WIlliam Spottiswoode (1825-1883),  an English mathematician and physicist, president of the Royal Society from 1878 to 1883, and of the British (Science) Association in 1878 as well, wrote a very appreciable piece on the state of Science in Nature in 1878.  At 15 pages this was a one-percenter for Nature so far as length goes--the pagination sounds short, except that the text was printed in about 8-pt, 90 columns per page, double columns, so the article was no doubt 15k+ words. There were numerous nuggets in this review and state of affairs of the sciences and technology, including sections on mathematics, literature and art, physics instrumentation, manifold space, imaginaries,  and so on, not the least of which was 1500 words on Non-Euclidean Geometry.

What struck me most in all of this was the half-column entry for “Mechanical Methods” (on page 413), which turns out to be “mechanical appliances”, or calculating machines/engines.  It starts with an unusual assertion:

“Mr Babbage, when speaking of the difficulty of insuring accuracy in the long numerical calculations of theoretical astronomy, remarked that that “most accurate science” had become “inaccurate and uncertain in some of its results”.

Spottiswoode continues with an explanation and a dig:

“It is doubtless, some such consideration as this, coupled with his dislike of employing skilled labour when unskilled labour would suffice, which led him to his invention o the calculating machine”.

The author then makes another—again, to my experience—unusual observation, referring to the replacement of human thinking capacity by a machine:

“The idea of substituting mechanized for intellectual power has not lain dormant...”

It is a very short comment, but I think makes a strong if understated point.

The author then moves onto the “recent” machine of James Thomson (“by its aid it seems an unskilled laborer may, in a given time, perform the work of ten skilled arithmeticians...reduced to the simple process of turning a handle"), before finishing with a flourish, though it is easy to read through. In telling the story of Michael Faraday, who after muscling through some concept and determining that the next step would be to hammer it all out mathematically, would “irreverently “ say “hand it over to the calculators”, which at that point was a team of human calculators, arithmeticians, and perhaps more famously known now as "computers".

And the finish:

“But truth is stranger than fiction; and if he had lived until our day, he might with perfect propriety have said, 'Hand it over to the machine' ”.

It is a small statement with a lot of possibility. Even though this comes seven years after Babbage gave up the ghost in Marleybone, it still seems remarkably early to be talking about this sort of major impact in the conduct of the sciences, lending part of the process over to machines. The Industrial Revolution is well into it second century by this point, and human effort in all manner of manufacturing has been replaced by machines—except here the active part of the human experience in the creation of ideas is the thing that is becoming “machinized”.

This brought to mind an earlier piece in the same journal by James Clerk Maxwell, who also wrote an assessment of recent developments in science². 

What I find to be most interesting here is Maxwell pulling back the reins and directing the idea of clear scientific discourse by means of analogy. He does speak of "calculating" and "calculating machine", which is referring to human calculators and not mechanical ones--the issue being that "spending a season" doing this stubborn and consuming work could turn the person occupied with in into a "machine". He writes: 

"What the man of science, whether he be a mathematician or a physical inquirer, aims to do, to acquire and develop clear ideas of the things he deals with. For this purpose he is willing to enter on long calculations, and to be for a season a calculating machine., if he can only at last make his ideas clearer."

"But if he finds that clear ideas are not obtained by the means of processes,  the steps of which he is sure to forget before he has reached the conclusion, it is much better that he should turn to another method, and try to understand the subject by well chosen illustrations derived from subjects with which he is more familiar."

"We all know how much more popular the illustrative method of exposition is found, than that in which bare processes of reasoning and calculation form the principal subject of discourse..."

 Notes:

1. SPOTTISWOODE, William. “British Association”, address on the state of the British Association by the president, in Nature, vol 18, no. 459, occupying most of the weekly issue, pp 403-425 in the issue of pp 401-428.
2.  MAXWELL,  James Clerk.  Mathematical and Physical Sciences--address to Section A of the British Association.  London:  1870.  Nature, vol 2, Sept 22, 1870.   Maxwell addresses the British Science Association meeting in a long (for Nature) entry of about 4,000 words, over 4 pages. 

What struck me most in all of this was the half-column entry for “Mechanical Methods” (on page 413), which turns out to be “mechanical appliances”, or calculating machines/engines.  It starts with an unusual assertion:

“Mr Babbage, when speaking of the difficulty of insuring accuracy in the long numerical calculations of theoretical astronomy, remarked that that “most accurate science” had become “inaccurate and uncertain in some of its results”.

Spottiswoode continues with an explanation and a dig:

“It is doubtless, some such consideration as this, coupled with his dislike of employing skilled labour when unskilled labour would suffice, which led him to his invention o the calculating machine”.

The author then makes another—again, to my experience—unusual observation, referring to the replacement of human thinking capacity by a machine:

“The idea of substituting mechanized for intellectual power has not lain dormant...”

It is a very short comment, but I think makes a strong if understated point.

The author then moves onto the “recent” machine of James Thomson (“by its aid it seems an unskilled laborer may, in a given time, perform the work of ten skilled arithmeticians...reduced to the simple process of turning a handle"), before finishing with a flourish, though it is easy to read through. In telling the story of Michael Faraday, who after muscling through some concept and determining that the next step would be to hammer it all out mathematically, would “irreverently “ say “hand it over to the calculators”, which at that point was a team of human calculators, arithmeticians, and perhaps more famously known now as "computers".

And the finish:

“But truth is stranger than fiction; and if he had lived until our day, he might with perfect propriety have said, 'Hand it over to the machine' ”.

It is a small statement with a lot of possibility. Even though this comes seven years after Babbage gave up the ghost in Marleybone, it still seems remarkably early to be talking about this sort of major impact in the conduct of the sciences, lending part of the process over to machines. The Industrial Revolution is well into it second century by this point, and human effort in all manner of manufacturing has been replaced by machines—except here the active part of the human experience in the creation of ideas is the thing that is becoming “machinized”.

"We are, then, gas engines." Turing and Some of his Childhood Reading.

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The enduring intellectual legacy of Alan Turing's childhood reading in the delightful (and deeply insightful) book Natural wonders every child should know (1912, 1939), by Edwin Tenney Brewster (1866-1960) can clearly be seen throughout the book, given its absorbing and penetrating curiosity. It is a very disarming book, and I think could be easily under-read, even though it has some semi-lofty writing given its audience, but if you give it a chance, there is a LOT going on in it.  The possible influence of the book, for example, in relation to Turing's relationship with thinking machines, can be seen in chapter 35, “The Living Automobile”, on pp 238-240, something that must have given the young Turing some considerable stuff to think about: 

“If you will think back over what you have already learned in this book, you will see that we began by finding out something about how we men, the animals, and the plants come to have any such things as bodies at all.... We found about something of what animals cannot do, and what they can do, and how they do...We learned how animals of various sorts, and plants as well, see and feel and act; and we learned also something about how we ourselves do our thinking, which is so very different, and so very-much better done, than that of any animal or plant.

“Now we turn to a different matter. We have taken up being, and doing, and thinking. Now we shall consider living. We shall learn about how the body of the plant or animal feeds itself and keeps alive, and how the different parts of it, the bones and skin and leaves and bark, manage to get on with one another, and work together like a well-made machine.”

“For, of course, the body is a machine. It is a vastly complex machine, many, many times more
complicated than any machine ever made by hands; but still after all a machine. It has been likened to a steam engine. But that was before we knew as much about the way it works as we know now. It really is a gas engine; like the engine of an automobile, a motorboat, or an airplane.”

"We are, then, gas engines.”

Full text of the 1939 edition is found here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924001126055;view=2up;seq=8

Burroughs, Batman, and Bullets in the History of Holes and Punched Card Computation

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2722

There is a continuing thread on this blog on The History of Holes--it is a series about, well,  holes and what isn't in them/what used to be in them/what you can see through them, and so on. This particular section of holes relates to the control and distribution of data and the great efficacy of utilizing holes punched into cards which would be arranged and tabulated in such a way as to order and manipulate mountains of data.  That said I don't recall seeing anything in print from the heyday of keypunching that actually mentioned the holes, as it does here--nor have I seen a non-William-Burroughs connection made between handguns, bullets, holes, and tabulation. Oddly enough, there is a connection with a crime fighter who didn't use a gun and whose sidekick used the exclamation "Holy ______ (computer, etc., and no expletives). And so we get to unite punched cards, computers, W.S. Burroughs, Batman, and The Time Tunnel.  (The Time Tunnel?--yes indeed, the tv show from the 60's can be brought into this as well..)

This is one of the first pages in a promotional pamphlet entitled Your Opportunity with the Maintenance Service Department Tabulating Machines Division of Remington Rand (ca. 1935-40). The title is stubby and factual, and the company was putting out a feeler for future engineering employees who could be trained to service and repair the many machines produced by Remington Rand that could be found in a largish business. 

Remington Rand at one time was Remington Arms, and then diversified to produce all manner of light and heavy electrical goods (and of course famously producing the standard U.S. Army sidearm, the 45-calber Remington M1911 pistol), and by the end of WWII the company produced a vast line of tabulating equipment (of another order of high caliber).  Interestingly the pamphlet exclaims that a person working for RR could work there for as long as they wanted, that the company was there to stay.  

Certainly the company would hang on for some time in one form or another, but the tabulating card division was about to change drastically.  In 1950 RR purchased Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company (ENIAC) and a few years later (1952) secured another giant computer pioneer, Engineering Research Associates (ERA), making Remington Rand about the largest computer company in the world. RR would be purchased a few years later by Sperry in 1955, becoming Sperry Rand, and then simply Sperry a short time after that; later, in 1986, Sperry would merge with Burroughs and become Unisys. Somewhere in there all of these tabulating machine repairmen and techs hired fresh in 1946 would be out of their lifetime job less than a decade later.  

Now back to William S. Burroughs--the gun/tabulating connection there is that Mr. Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife in a game of "William Tell"--he is also the grandson of William Seward Burroughs of Burroughs Adding/Tabulating Machine and computer mainframe fame. (Burroughs was founded in 1886 and became Burroughs Corp in 1953 and was one of the nine major computer manufacturers in the U.S. 100 years after its founding Burroughs Corp merged with Sperry--which had absorbed Remington Rand--to become Unisys.) 

On to The Batman of the 1960's tv show where the connection between punched holes and "holy" is obvious and obscure--the caped crusader and Robin used a Burroughs computer (the B205) in the Batcave. The same goes for The Time Tunnel, where we see another use of the B205, used to enable the intrepid time travelers to jump into their funnel-shaped time machine and dive into a hole in time much like Harry Potter at platform 9 ^3/4.   I suspect that there are more examples, but I'll stop here.

• (A big salute to the "Starring the Computer" website, which has an extensive list of the B205 appearing in movies and television: http://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=45  as well as a very long list of appearances of many other non-fictional computers. It is an excellent effort!)

Lastly, some illustrations from the pamphlet, which surpisingly does not show up at all in WorldCat/OCLC.

 

["Typical office installations of Remington Rand equipment"]

On Expanding the Boundaries of Things I Don't Know

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2720

Here's a good example of "where do I go with this puzzle now?" from the daily work that I do. The stages in working with odd material like the following goes from (1) recognizing that this junky-looking bit isn't nothing; (2) identifying the something in the nothing that an outsider like me can recognize; (3) figuring out where the thing might fit in context with its development of whatever; (4) seeing how it may or may not be significant in the development of its subject; and (5) trying to figure out if I know what I was talking about in #s 1-4 (this is usually the most difficult step). In an event, I worked with something just now where it seemed to strike interesting chords along several areas, but in the end I was back at the beginning.  

The item in mind is an early application of computers in forming a bibliographic meteorological database: Final Report of Bibliographic Section of Cooperative Research Project Between the U.S. Weather Bureau and North Carolina State College, which was produced in 1949 in 11 sheets, 9 of which are blueprints of text (including“Final Report...” pp 1-6, “Appendix 2 [sic], Meteorological Factor Codes”, 3pp).  Also included is a sample IBM card mock-up with hand-printed notation.  It is accompanied by an extensive two-page cover letter explaining the bibliography project in some detail, and was written by Reuben M. Harding (“assistant statistician”) on the UNC at Raleigh Institute of Statistics letterhead. (The director and associate directors were all heavy hitter statisticians, including Gertrude Cox, William Cochran, and Harold Hotelling.)  The letter is dated March 11, 1949, and written to Jack Haynes (“Basic Sciences Division, Biological Department, Chemical Corps, Camp Detrick”. “Camp Detrick” was named so from “Detrick Field” in 1943, and became after great expansion in Biowar “Fort Detrick” in 1953.) I cannot find out anything about Harding save for his dates (1919-1997) and I found nothing on Mr. Haynes, though given the nature of Fort Detrick, this does not surprise me at all, as those guys--being at the center of biological and chemical weaponry establishment in the U.S.--were doing work that generally was not published or publicly shared.

Basically it seems that Haynes wrote to Harding for general information on creating database on punch cards, though not necessarily for meteorological purposes. There is a mention for example of “battlefield conditions” which would not necessarily appear in a meteorological bibliography, but there is no hint in the letter at all regarding the ultimate applied interest of Detrick might've been. So my guess is that Haynes was interested in structure and not content. Harding responds mostly outlining the weaknesses of his project, though this critique is very highly useful in itself, and for all I know may have been the most significant contribution of the entire affair. 

Here's the cover letter, which makes for interesting reading in itself, with some good insight on how to convey information on a proposed project and what the troublesome issues were--it is worth a read from that perspective alone.

And the first page of the blueprinted document:

And the punch card mock-up:

And so, it was an interesting time figuring out some of the parts of this document, but after everything was said and done, I really didn't know where I was. The document itself didn't show up as a published entity in WorldCat, and general academic searches revealed nothing of use on my early attempts, which means all I have thus far are discrete bits of information, explaining more deeply what I don't know. Sometimes these things are a challenge, and sometimes they need to be let go, in spite of the convincingly-interesting bits that surround them.  We'll see what happens to this...

And speaking of things that I don't know, I'm not even sure what post number this really is--I say "2720" but I think in the last few hundred numbered post I've lost my numerical way, and I'm not positive of what number I am up to. It gets more confusing as there are unnumbered "quick posts", which number probably now about 2k, and since there can be 5 or 10 or more of them spaced between numbered posts, I sometimes just forget what number I am pushing against. 

The Twelve Leading Digital Computer Manufacturers in the U.S., 1954

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I found something to share--this interesting table (based on numbers gathered by Arthur D. Little) showing the top-12 U.S. computer-producing firms and their incomes for 1956. [Note: the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator figures $1 in 1956 is "worth" nearly ten time that--$9.21--in 2017.] (This came as a result of researching the Elecom 100 digital computer for a manual that I found for the machine, finding that Elecom had been purchased by Underwood, which at that point was the 9th highest grossing computer manufacturing companies in the U.S.)

Worth noting is that of the 12 in 1954 only 6 remained in 1965; in 1975 the number was 5, and in 1986, 4. Interesting to see the shares of the market by the standard office calculator companies like NCR, Monroe, Burroughs, and Marchant. 

• Source:  Kenneth Flamm, Creating the Computer: Government, Industry and High Technology, Brookings, 1988, pg 82.

 

The Sudden, Unexpected, Ineffable Beauty of Pile Driving (1950)

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I was making my way through the IBM  Proceedings of the Industrial Computation Seminar for September, 1950, after having reported on the article by pioneer Wallace Eckert¹ on the role of punched cards in scientific computation, when I read down the contents list and found a paper titled  "Pile-Driving Impact".  The contents page listed the author (Edward A. Smith) but not their association, and so when I turned to the article I expected a vision-of-the-future-world-of-computer sorta paper. 

Wrong! 

The paper was far more interesting than that, and Mr. Smith--from the Raymond Concrete Pile Company--was writing about piles, pile driving, and the impact of the application of computing in the course of doing pile driving...and teh people who loved them. Well, not that last part, but everything preceding it. Of course it makes sense to be writing about this, though I had never before considered the role of computation on pile-driving before this--and I must report that Smith's paper was sort of beautiful, in its way.  I was very happy to have read it.  

Here's a part of the Smith piece to enjoy, followed by a link for the rest of the paper.

• Pile-Driving Impact, by EDWARD A. SMITH (Kaymond Concrete Pile Company ) “[Calculations] performed in the IBM Technical Computing Bureau, provided a complete numerical analysis of the behavior of a pile when struck by a pile-driving hammer. The results indicated what stresses occurred within the pile and capblock, as well as the penetration of the pile into the earth. This is an example of the replacement of costly experimentation by economical calculations...”
• “Previously, using only key-driven calculators, it has been possible to study only partially a few isolated cases of the behavior of a pile under an impact. This was due to the high cost in time and money associated with each case studied. By employing the high speed and accuracy of IBM electronic calculating machines to perform this repeated formula evaluation, it is possible to study the behavior of numerous pile types. The cost of each case studied thereby will be substantially reduced.”
• Source, and for the rest of the paper, see Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_ibmproceedmputationSeminarSep50_8283585/IBM_Industrial_Computation_Seminar_Sep50_djvu.txt

Notes: 
1. Eckert was professor of astronomy at Columbia from 1926 to 1970 (!), as well as the Director of
the US Naval Observatory Nautical Almanac Office, and founder and Director of the Watson
Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University).

"As Director of Watson Lab and IBM's Director of Pure Science, he oversaw construction of the SSEC
(arguably the first true computer) and NORC (less arguably the first supercomputer), the most 
powerful computers of their day, as well as of the IBM 610 – the world's first "personal 
computer" – and he installed the first computers at Columbia open to research and instruction,
meanwhile initiating what might very well be the first computer science curriculum, in 1946, 
including his own course, Astronomy 111-112: Machine Methods in Scientific Computing, along 
with other courses that same year taught by Watson Lab scientists Grosch and Thomas."
--http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/eckert.html

On "Long" and "Short" Time in the History of Modern Computers

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2714

The history of computing, at its inception, could have its fluidity measured in decades, beginning, say with Babbage; by the time of the earliest large machines (1945-1955) computer time could be measured by less than a decade, and probably half of that.  In the 1960s the computer year could be measured, finally, in single years.  After that, after microminiaturization, and the personal computer, the year of currency started to be measured in months.  And then, of course, the year really sped up--I'm not sure if there is only a week or two in the year, now; maybe the year of progress in 1955 is today measured in days, or hours. I suspect that this will all continue to get faster, as it has been only 70 years or so that the computer world started to bulk up; I imagine that the changes that will come in 2087 will have us looking at least as "quaint" as 1947 looks to us. 

And how far back is "way back", or "waaay back", in terms of (computer) history?  I've written earlier in this blog about going deep into history in various disciplines, but perhaps in no discipline is time so compacted than in the computer sciences.   Mr. Peabody would probably agree (though he wasn't a very agreeable person), finding that in terms of other big leaps into the past that to go "way back" in his "way back machine" to get chronologically deep in computer history wouldn't take very much at all. 

Anyway, some of these senses of time and how only 50 years ago seems like much longer can be seen in the bits and pieces of computer science ephemera. Looking into the "archives" here I found a document from the beginning of the first tweaks of mass professionalism in sompsci.  This draft of the constitution and bylaws of the Association for Computing Machinery (the ACM) was complete in only four pages, including the data on the establishment of its members, officers, executive committee, meetings, bylaws, meetings--the whole deal, in four pages. 

The document is undated, but as far as I can determine, I believe that this document was printed in 1953, soon after the ACM dropped the "Eastern" that used to appear as the first word in the title of the organization, and after it moved to 2 East 63rd St 

Its quite a quietly, unspectacular spectacular thing, seeing what would become a vast organization be summed up in its infancy on two sheets of folded paper.   

 

 

1954 is extremely deep in the history of electronic calculation--it is three years before Backus et alia created FORTRAN, five years before the integrated circuit was created, eight years before the first compsci department is established at Purdue, eleven years before the first Ph.D. is awarded in computer sci from a computer science department (Wexelblatt), and fourteen years before the first woman (Liskov) earned a Ph.D.(whose dissertation was A Program to Play Chess Endgames) in the field.  All of which sounds like ancient history, but almost all of which takes place during my own lifetime, which doesn't make it sound so terribly "ancient".

But looking at this ephemera on membership and dues and voting on the Constitution for the Association for Computing Machinery certainly makes it seem as though so--the voting and bylaws ballot is a few mimeographed pages long and is hand-stapled at the top, the announcements for meetings fits on one sheet of paper, and Edmund C. Berkeley is hand signing his initials on pleas for new subscribers to his Computers and Automation journal.  Everything looks so fresh and new and uncomplicated--and that's because it was, relative to what we experience now.  In 1954 there weren't 10,000 people working in the field of computing; 63 years later the growth in involvement of people working in the field is at least three orders of magnitude more, the growth in the sheer volume of printed and digitally-circulated material is probably somewhere on the order of the differences between post-Gutenberg European printing and the printing industry in the year 1990.  The changes are tremendous, and they seem to be so much more appreciable when one looks at the foundation efforts from the early years.

 

 

 

 

A Map of an Early Electronic Brain (1948)

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 This is the floor plan for the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, b. 1943-45) which was, basically, the world’s first operational, high-speed digital computer, and (about) marked the beginning of the next stage of technological revolution.  What we see above is the floor plan for the computer-with-no-monitor—I know to most people working today with a computer that the idea of a “floor plan” for anything that is not in a dark place at NSA is not easily conceivable.  The 30-ton, 18,000 tube, 125 KHz ENIAC’s space was about 1800 square feet, where it was able to add about 5000 numbers/second, which was vastly faster than anything else in existence. It operated with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 5 million hand-soldered joints and 6,000 manual switches. It was a magnificent achievement.

[Source: J.G. Brainerd & T.K. Sharpless. "The ENIAC."  Article occupying pp 163-172 of the February 1948 issue of Electrical Engineering. ]

When Did the Term "Computer Science" First Appear?

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Some time ago I wrote a post on the origins of some scientific words, just to see how long they have been around--some are well-known in their newness (like "scientist" coming along in 1834, ¹  anonymously referenced in the Quarterly Review, volume 51, page 59), others not so.

And so when an interesting word relating to artificial intelligence appeared I wondered when AI itself did (J. McCarthy 1955 and then Marvin Minsky 1956)...which led to the question of how old the term "computer science" is, and so on. Not wanting to spend more than a half hour on this I decided to establish the Oxford English Dictionary as the baseline for earliness in the first (or at least very early) appearances in English of these words and let it go at that. So here's the list, a quick shake-and-bake on the early origins of some standard and not-so-standard words in computer science.

A footnote here is that 10 of the 38 words here appear during the life of Charles Babbage (whose eye are posted above). 

Notes:

1.  The word is provided to us in the text of an article on Mary Somerville by William Whewell who references the word "scientist" coming from "a gentleman" who was  I guess himself; he uses the word under his own name in 1840.

• Computer Science. 1956   N.Y. Times 28 Oct. iii. 21 (advt.)    "Unparalleled opportunities to associate with the prominent pioneers of computer science, at outstanding salaries. Electronic engineers (circuit designers and magnetics engineers), logical designers, [etc.]."

• Computer programming: 1952   Proc. ACM National Meeting (Toronto) 20/1   "In fact three principles should apply to computer programming and operation in general, and not just to code checking." This was followed by “computer programmer” after three years.  

• And so:

• computationalism, n.1979

• computationalist, n....1956

• computatist, n.1611

• computative, adj.a1538

• computator, n.1591

• compute, n.1483

• compute, v.1579

• computed, adj.1680

Introducing the 6 bit Core Memory UNIVAC 1004 (1962)

New for 1962, the UNIVAC 1004 Card Processor 1004. The text of the ad for this tri-fold/broadside advertisment tells us that the UNIVAC machine is "faster" than its human variants, and allows for more reports to be generated at a quicker pace. This was state of the art for 1962, and no doubt companies would want one, if they could afford it.  And just for the record, this unit cost about $148,000 when new, or about $1.2 million in 2017 dollars (computed by the BLS inflation calculator).  

(Be careful of the UNIVAC trademark, which was registered by Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, Remington Rand Corporation, Sperry Rand Corporation, Sperry Corporation, and Unysis.) 

The pamphlet-y object is an 11x4.5" tri-fold which opens to a display of 19x14" demonstrating the fabulous new and fast features of the machine (and improved by 1966 as the 1005). The image also shows the 1004 printer and a model coyly holding a few punch cards like a geisha fan. 

"The UNIVAC 1004 was a plug-board programmed punched card data processing system, introduced in 1962, by UNIVAC. Total memory was 961 characters (6 bits) of core memory. Peripherals were a card reader (400 cards/minute), a card punch (200 cards/minute) using proprietary 90-column, round-hole cards or IBM-compatible, 80-column cards, a drum printer (400 lines/minute) and a Uniservo tape drive. The 1004 was also supported as a remote card reader & printer via synchronous communication services. A U.S. Navy (Weapons Station, Concord) 1004 was dedicated to printing from tape as a means of offloading the task from their Solid State 80 mainframe, which produced the tapes. A plug-board program called Emulator was widely installed to convert 1004s to stored-program operation, reading in instructions from program decks of cards which determined the processing of the following data decks."--Wikipedia on UNIVAC

A Fine Display of Pie Charts 1893

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"This apparatus works unerringly as the mills of the gods, but beats them hollow as to speed"--Electrical Engineer, November 11, 1891

Many splendid displays of newly-manipulable data made their appearance in the Henry Gannet atlas to accompany the great U.S. census of 1890 --this example displays the composition of foreign born inhabitants of each of the states.  Part of this was due to the use of the Herman Hollerith tabulators, which made their appearance for the census office to work their electromechanical magic to process data faster than the 8-year-long process of the 1880 census. As it stands, the Gannet atlas and the census report was published beginning just two years after the completion of the 1890 census, a job made possible by the "mills of the gods" machine and some 48,000 enumerators (who completed returns for 13,000,000 households).  With prodigious thanks to Hollerith, the census was completed quickly and with a wider variety of data collection rather than what would have been the opposite without them. 

Robot/Computer Anthropomorphic Brains

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2570 (continued)

There seems to be a developing thread in the stuff I've been saving on the history of anthropomorphic robots pre-1955 or so--and that is, the robotic or computer brain.  These are not nearly as plentiful as the robot-entire, or at least that is the way it seems from a general impression of long and sloppy reading in the area. I bumped into another brain post, this one still on the early-ish side, coming from Popular Science Monthly for 1930. It really is a stand alone, and an illustration for an advertisement for radios, but it still sent a message to the reader, and it seems that it probably was still very uncommon territory in the application of images like this:

That really is beginning to put the hot tube-scented "logic" into biological.  

Here's another, one that I wrote about some time ago, though this one has more the makings of a computer in place of some tubes and a dial.

This may well be the first public, popular, report on the Harvard Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) (appearing in the American Weekly, 15 October 1944), the first automatic, general-purpose, digital calculator.  Known as the MARK 1, it was the brainchild of Howard Aiken (1900-1973), a graduate student at Harvard, who started it all in 1937 by proposing a series of coordinated Monroe calculators to function as a unified whole  that would cross the threshold of the physically-impossible calculation (though theoretically possible) to the eminently doable. Here's a detail of the inset:

There are some others in the category, including this fine image from the Burroughs people:

The Burroughs Adding Machine company did about as much as anyone to objectify the worker in America during the 1880-1915 period, making the worker a part of a machine within the machine. In a way it was like creating the Ford assembly line for people sitting down. 

The company was founded on the work of William S. Burroughs' grandfather, William Seward Burroughs (1857-1898 and native son of Rochester, NY), who created a mechanical calculator to help him add long columns of numbers in his job as a bank clerk. American Arithmometer Company was founded by him and others in 1886, later evolving into Burroughs Adding Machine Company (1904), Burroughs Corporation (1953), and then into Unisys (combining with Sperry Univac in 1986) before sliding away.

In any event the adding machine connected millions of people to a mechanizing process of what had previously been a mental operation--the flywheel in the side of the head of the clerk/accountant in this add for Technical World (More Fascinating than Fiction) for August 1915 wasn't too terribly far from the truth. Interesting that on the other side of the head of this fellow, behind the other ear, is a pencil. 

Another in this line of depicting human brains as sort-of machines is this very entry-level bit of gearing in an advert for a tech correspondence school for folks to "modernize make more money", and found in  Popular Mechanics, August 1936. As these things go, it would be difficult to imagine a less complex depiction of a mechanical brain:

And another--again, this is not much of an electronic brain, but it does get across the point of the ad for the Alpha Corporation ("A subsidiary of Collins Radio Company") for 1958:

 

And yet another boundary is threatened with the astromatic panel concept of the Electrosnap corp (of Chicago), showing the interaction of biological and electronic systems, as shown in this advertisement in Missile and Rockets in 1959:

In any event, these are three of this developing collection of metalizing/electrifying the brain for its robot-y future.  

On Finding Mr. Babbage and a Very Early Mention of the Future of Computing (1822)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2657

I was browsing though a volume of Annals of Philosophy¹ (1822) for my business, looking for interesting and significant contributions.  Making my way nearly to the end I was not able to come away with anything of particular importance, though there were enough bits in it to make it an interesting purchase for someone, and to probably get a nice blog post out of it. (My main "hook" in the volume's story for the blog was a happenstance opening of the volume to a page exhibiting two short articles "Definition of a Straight Line" followed a paragraph late by "Black Urine".) Nearly at the end of the book, though, I came upon a very unexpected "find": "A Letter to Sir Humphrey Davy, Bart., President of the Royal Society, &c &C, on the Application of Machinery to the Purpose of Calculating and Printing Mathematical Tables...London, 1822" by Charles Babbage (appearing on pp 383-388).  This appeared as a book review in the "Analysis of Books" section of the Annals with the running header of "Mr. Babbage's Letter to Sir H. Davy", and published in November 1822².

[The beginning of the article in the Annals...; the full text appears below]

This is a review of a 12-page paper--an open letter--written by Babbage to Davy on July 3, 1822, which was the first public discussion and detailed description of Babbage's Difference Engine. (I should note that the printers of this privately-printed paper and that of the Annals are the same.) This paper would make its way to the Royal Society which in turn, on May 1 1823, advocated the support (and funding) of Babbage's machine. 

The original publication of the Babbage letter is a great rarity, and I would say that for me finding that would be impossible if I wasn't willing (and of course not able) to afford the very high entry price for the item.  So, finding this in the Annals, finding a review of this very important and rare publication issued just months following the original paper was fascinating.  

And I nearly missed it.

Most of the contents of this review are quotes taken from Babbage's work. A review of the paper also appeared in the British Critic, 1822 (full text found here: http://babbagedifferenceengine.blogspot.com/2014/09/article-in-british-critic-october-1822.html)

The full text of the rriginal Babbage paper is here:  https://sites.google.com/site/babbagedifferenceengine/babbagelettertosirhumphrydavy

Other papers of interest in the volume include: M. Prechtel, "On the Foundational State of the Magnetic Phenomena of the Electrical Connecting Wire", pp 1-6;Charles Sylvester, "On the Specific Gravity of Gases", pp 29-31; [Anonymous] "Definition of a Straight Line", p 71; [Anonymous], "Black Urine", pp 71-2;  T. Weaver, " Geological Remarks", pp 81-93; William Buckland, "Account of Fossil Teeth and Bones discovered in a Cave in Kirkdale", pp 133-146 and concluded pp 173-195;  [Note on] "Frauenhofer's Experiments on the Illuminating Power of the Prismatic Rays", p 157; William Hyde Wollaston, "On the Finite Extent of the Atmosphere", pp 251-256; James Smithson, "Some Improvements of Lamps", pp 363-364;

Notes:

1. Annals of philosophy, natural history, chemistry, literature, agriculture, and the mechanical and fine arts, edited by Thomas Thomson, printed in London for Baldwin, Craddock, and Joy, 1822; volume IV, July to December, 1822. Vii, (ii), 480pp, 6 engraved plates (half folding). Provenance: R. Crum Brown for the University Library of Edinburgh, with their bookplate.

2. The full title of Babbage's work as it appeared in 1822:  Letter to Sir Humphry Davy, Bart, President of the Royal Society, &c.&c. On the Application of Machinery to the Purpose of Calculating and Printing Mathematical Tables, from Charles Babbage, Esq. M.A. F.R.S. Lond. and Edin., Member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Secretary of the Astronomical Society of London, and Correspondent of the Philomathic Society of Paris. 4to 12pp Baldwin & Co. 1822.  July 3, 1822

Brevity and Complexity--ALGOL 1960

JF Ptak Science Books     

I think that I'd like to start a new category of observation for this blog--complicated work explained with celebrated brevity and clarity.  Earlier today I wrote a post on a 24-page effort by the great polymath and mathematical titan, Henri Poincare, describing his Newtonian-clad version of relativity, and it certainly classifies as a superior effort in a short, clarifying description of a wide and complex topic.  Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is another--it is considerably longer though incredibly short for the work that it undertakes, ending with a sentence that has become an independently-standing aphorism, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence".

But for right now, I'd like to look at a splendidly short work.

Much is owed to people like Peter Naur¹, a Dane who made an enormous contribution in the development of computer languages by being the lead developer in the creation of ALGOL.  As a matter of fact Naur (b. 1928) received the computing world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize (“highest distinction in Computer science")–the Turing Award–for this work, receiving the high honor in 2005. The official short description–again in the manner of the Nobel Committee– was “(f)or fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of ALGOL 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming”.         

This all came to mind while looking through Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60 (published in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, May 1960) which was edited by Naur.  ALGOL was the creation of 40+ minds, twelve of whom were listed contributing to this paper-–it is a great testament to Naur to control all of that input, producing a superb fifteen page report of great brevity, beautiful logic and utter accessibility.  Perhaps If the team was given a lot more time Naur could’ve made his work even more succinct, but I really doubt it.  It is written in a language that is somewhat foreign to me, but I can certainly appreciate the way the work is structured its precise manner of presentation.  It seems to me a hallmark of communicating complicated ideas in a small space.

NOTES:

1.  NAUR, P. (with J. W. Backus, F. L. Bauer, J. Green, C. Katz, J. Mccarthy, P. Naur, A. J. Perlis, H. Rutishauser, K. Samelson, B. Vauquois, J. H. Wegstein, A. Wijngaarden,M. Woodger) . Report on the algorithmic language ALGOL 60. Offprint:  Communications of the ACM,  May, 1960, vol 3, #5. 25x21cm, pp 299-314.  Rare.  There is evidently an two months earlier-but-not-circulated report (no citation for this), as well as a later printing appearing in  Numerische Mathematik, 2/1, December, 1960, followed in 1962 with a longer edition.

Charles Babbage, Humorist

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

There are certain sections of Charles Babbage's surveys of his life--Passages in the Life of a Philosopher, 1864--that are very unexpectedly, well, funny. I mean, there are stories told with a bald/dry sense of humor, a stony-faced delight, that I think are actually intentional. Perhaps I'm reading this all wrong--and if so someone will just have to correct me.  But rounding out long sections on the Difference Engines (1&2) and calculation and the future of  railroading and so on are long complaints regarding  the quirkiness of his day, as with the "destruction" of his time via a chapter named "street nuisances", into which Babbage dives fairly deeply with some occasionally comic recountings of what pisses him off, which was frankly a lot. 

What most intrigues me in this interpretation is the possible found-comedic or intentionally-comedic running page titles.  These are the several word descriptions of what is on the page that floats centered and above the text at the head of each page, which was a common practice in the 19th century.  It is here where Babbage really soars with the eagles, and I prefer to believe that he and not an editor put together these mot juste--they seem cranky and irritating enough to have been somewhat carefully selected.  In any event, I recorded a number of them below, for your amusement:

• 52 Eggs
• Artificial Swedes
• Weight of Nepotism
• Game of Tit-Tat-Toe
• Occulating Sun Signals
• The Story of the Two Pumps
• The author in Want of Cash
• The Learned Ponder Dunder
• Disturbed Vision
• The True Use of Figures
• Various Shakes and Smashes
• Conversion of Attics into Cellars
• Space Too Large for Itself (!!)
• A Decent Waist Coat
• Awful Crash
• The Value of a Button
• Winking Statues
• Primitive Purity--It Won't Do
• Biscuits and Whisky
• A Finite Machine May Make Unlimited Calculations
• and so on

Many of these are pure clickbait--who could see "Conversion of Attics to Cellars" and not read on?  Science would demand you do so.  

In any event, the book is well worth a read, of course--I mean it is Charles Babbage, and he does discus some very interesting things with razor-sharpness. And I'm sorry somewhat for concentrating on the funny bits, but they were just so unexpected I thought I needed to haul them out and get them some sun. 

The full text via Internet archive: https://archive.org/stream/passagesfromlif01babbgoog#page/n2/mode/2up