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Class Date: December 18th
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Computing
Computing
This time we’re talking about the life of Admiral Grace Hopper, pioneering computer scientist. Our timeline will cover some of the technological advances that helped lead to the computer age. Enjoy!
1837 - The first Tabulating Machine invented
Swiss lawyer and inventor Per Georg Scheutz created the first full-scale difference engine, a mechanical machine to tabulate polynomial functions. The machines were later bought by an Observatory in New York and the British government.
1858 - Transatlantic Cable is completed
The completion of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858 was a cause for much celebration on both sides of the Atlantic. Tiffany & Company of New York purchased the cable remaining on board the USS Niagara after the successful completion of the cable and sold 4-inch sections as souvenirs.
1890 - Census collection competition
The 1880 US census had taken 7 years to complete since all processing had been done by hand from journal sheets. The increasing population suggested that by the 1890 census, data processing would take longer than the 10 years before the next census—so a competition was held to find a better method. It was won by a Census Department employee, Herman Hollerith, who went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company, later to become IBM. He invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine.
1897 - Dracula first published
Bram Stoker first published the story Dracula in London. Though contracts for publication were usually worked out 6 months in advance, Stoker’s was hammered out in just 6 days. He earned no royalties for the first 1,000 copies. It was serialized in American publications but later discovered that Stoker had not properly secured the copyright for his novel, thus placing it in the public domain. Unfortunately for Bram, he never made much money from its publication, despite the fact that it has not been out of print since 1897!
1914 - Panama Canal Opened
The world was desperate to get to the West Coast of North America after the discovery of gold in California in 1848 without sailing around the tip of South America. The United States encouraged Panama’s independence from Columbia and built the Panama Canal, which opened to sea traffic in 1914.
1917 - The US declares war on Germany
The United States declared war on Germany and its allies, but recognized its need for greater communication that adversaries could not understand. Things like the Zimmerman Telegraph also illustrated the value of coded intelligence. To read more about the significance of the Zimmerman Telegram, click here: https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/wwi/zimmermann-telegram
A new group was created, known as the Cipher Bureau, under the direction of Herbert O. Yardley. Headquartered in Washington D.C., the code and cypher description unit was part of the war effort under the Executive, lacking Congressional authorization or oversight. After the war ended in 1919, Yardley’s Bureau was moved to New York City, as a joint venture between the Army and the State Department. Known as The Black Chamber, it was disguised as a New York City commercial code company. The Black Chamber did sell commercial codes, but it also devoted time to breaking the communication codes of other nations.
1924 - The Mulholland Highway completed
The road along the ridge of the Santa Monica mountains and Hollywood Hills opens for drivers to twist and turn along while taking in one of America’s most beautiful drives.
1928 - IBM punch cards
IBM standardizes on punched cards with 80 columns of data and rectangular holes. Widely known as IBM Cards, they dominated the data processing industry for almost half a century.
1928 - First television broadcast
From 1939 to 1941, about 7,000 television sets were sold. This new technology was out of reach for most Americans as sets ranged from $200 to $600. Television broadcasts were limited to a few large cities such as New York and Los Angeles; they became available across the country only after World War II.
1929 - Black Chamber disbanded
Secretary of State Henry Stimson made the decision to disband the organization. He, and others, were uncomfortable with the level of surveillance, especially as the Bureau had deals with Western Union and other telegraph companies to get access to messages coming in and out of the United States. President Hoover also didn’t see the need for peacetime surveillance, so the Bureau was shut down. Yardley was left unemployed and angry that his work was dismissed by the administration. In response, Yardley published a book, The American Black Chamber, about the surveillance conducted by the Cipher Bureau. Excerpts featured in The Saturday Evening Post shocked not only the United States, but countries that had been spied upon.
Though Yardley revealed a shocking amount of intelligence, other organizations were developing intelligence Bureaus of their own. In 1929, the U.S. Army formed the Signal Intelligence Service (SIS). Throughout the 1930s, the SIS opened bases and kept an eye on the Japanese Empire. Their intelligence gathering would prove vital in the American response to the Japanese bombing at Pearl Harbor and throughout the war in the Pacific Theater.
1939- Hewlett-Packard founded
David Packard and Bill Hewlett found their company in a Palo Alto, California garage. Their first product, the HP 200A Audio Oscillator, rapidly became a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. Walt Disney Pictures ordered eight of the 200B model to test recording equipment and speaker systems for the 12 specially equipped theatres that showed the movie “Fantasia” in 1940.
1941 - The First Bombe completed
Built as an electro-mechanical means of decrypting Nazi ENIGMA-based military communications during World War II, the British Bombe is conceived of by computer pioneer Alan Turing and Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company. Hundreds of allied bombes were built in order to determine the daily rotor start positions of Enigma cipher machines, which in turn allowed the Allies to decrypt German messages. The basic idea for bombes came from Polish code-breaker Marian Rejewski's 1938 "Bomba."
1944 - Harvard Mark 1 completed
Conceived by Harvard physics professor Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark 1 is a room-sized, relay-based calculator. The machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft running the length of machine that synchronized the machine’s thousands of component parts and used 3,500 relays. The Mark 1 produced mathematical tables but was soon superseded by electronic stored-program computers.
That’s where our timeline leaves us for the week. Tune in to learn more about the period!
Recommended Reading
Recommended Reading
For kids:
Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code by Laurie Wallmark
“If you’ve got a good idea, and you know it’s going to work, go ahead and do it.”
The inspiring story of Grace Hopper—the boundary-breaking woman who revolutionized computer science—is told in an engaging picture book biography.
Who was Grace Hopper?
A software tester, workplace jester, cherished mentor, ace inventor, avid reader, naval leader—AND rule breaker, chance taker, and troublemaker. Acclaimed picture book author Laurie Wallmark (Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine) once again tells the riveting story of a trailblazing woman. Grace Hopper coined the term “computer bug” and taught computers to “speak English.” Throughout her life, Hopper succeeded in doing what no one had ever done before. Delighting in difficult ideas and in defying expectations, the insatiably curious Hopper truly was “Amazing Grace” . . . and a role model for science- and math-minded girls and boys. With a wealth of witty quotes, and richly detailed illustrations, this book brings Hopper's incredible accomplishments to life.
The Girl Who Could Talk to Computers by Maya Cointreau
The Girls Who Could is a fun, colorful series of true stories about women who have made a difference in the world through inspired action. By giving young girls examples of people who are doing big, amazing things, children grow up with a template of achievement upon which to grow and expand their own dreams and goals.
The Girl Who Could Talk to Computers is the first book in The Girls Who Could Series. It tells the story of young Grace Hopper, the inquiring girl who wrote the first computer compiler program which gave birth to the first computer language, COBOL. After “Amazing Grace” helped bring us into the modern computer-age, she dedicated her life to teaching and inspiring young people to dream big.Written for girls and boys, readers ages 4-9.
Also available in Spanish!
For Adults:
Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age by Kurt W. Beyer
A Hollywood biopic about the life of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper (1906--1992) would go like this: a young professor abandons the ivy-covered walls of academia to serve her country in the Navy after Pearl Harbor and finds herself on the front lines of the computer revolution. She works hard to succeed in the all-male computer industry, is almost brought down by personal problems but survives them, and ends her career as a celebrated elder stateswoman of computing, a heroine to thousands, hailed as the inventor of computer programming. Throughout Hopper's later years, the popular media told this simplified version of her life story. In Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, Kurt Beyer reveals a more authentic Hopper, a vibrant and complex woman whose career paralleled the meteoric trajectory of the postwar computer industry. Both rebellious and collaborative, Hopper was influential in male-dominated military and business organizations at a time when women were encouraged to devote themselves to housework and childbearing. Hopper's greatest technical achievement was to create the tools that would allow humans to communicate with computers in terms other than ones and zeroes. This advance influenced all future programming and software design and laid the foundation for the development of user-friendly personal computers.
Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea by Kathleen Broome Williams
When Grace Hopper retired as a rear admiral from the U.S. Navy in 1986, she was the first woman restricted line officer to reach flag rank and, at the age of seventy-nine, the oldest serving officer in the Navy. A mathematician by training who became a computer scientist, the eccentric and outspoken Hopper helped propel the Navy into the computer age. She also was a superb publicist for the Navy, appearing frequently on radio and television and quoted regularly in newspapers and magazines. Yet in spite of all the attention she received, until now ""Amazing Grace,"" as she was called, has never been the subject of a full biography. Kathleen Broome Williams looks at Hopper's entire naval career, from the time she joined the WAVES and was sent in 1943 to work on the Mark I computer at Harvard, where she became one of the country's first computer programmers. Thanks to this early Navy introduction to computing, the author explains, Hopper had a distinguished civilian career in commercial computing after the war, gaining fame for her part in the creation of COBOL. The admiral's Navy days were far from over, however, and Williams tells how Hopper--already past retirement age--was recalled to active duty at the Pentagon in 1967 to standardize computer-programming languages for Navy computers. Her temporary appointment lasted for nineteen years while she standardized COBOL for the entire department of defense. Based on extensive interviews with colleagues and family and on archival material never before examined, this biography not only illuminates Hopper's pioneering accomplishments in a field that came to be dominated by men, but provides a fascinating overview of computing from its beginnings in World War II to the late 1980s.
Works Cited
Works Cited
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