Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age Page 3
The sheer volume of interviews available afforded me the ability to look at a given historical experience from a variety of different perspectives. Hopper’s memories could be compared and contrasted with the memories of many others who were witness to the same events in question. Likewise, Hopper was interviewed many times over 40 years, and it became apparent that with time she became accustomed to telling a given story. But how Hopper “scripted” the past also provides insight into how she viewed the world and herself within that world. The depth and breadth of oral histories, combined with other primary and secondary sources, allows for the accurate plotting of the past, despite the fallibility of memory.
DISTRIBUTED BIOGRAPHY
For much of the twentieth century, biography was an accepted and widely utilized genre within the history of technology. Early texts praised the pioneers of various technologies, including Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers.17 The ideal of the selfless individual inventor tinkering in a basement or a garage for the benefit of society resonated with both academics and lay readers. This hagiographic approach served to advance the virtue of individual achievement while legitimizing the value of technological change.
Books that highlighted specific technologies employed the biographical genre as well. Hugh Aitken’s tribute to radio and Thomas Hughes’s detailed account of the electrification of Western society anchor the narrative to a few individuals responsible for the technical achievement.18 In fact, one could argue that the cornerstone of Hughes’s influential systems methodology is not the system itself but rather its builder. The system builder is a sovereign individual who, through leadership, intuition, and technical prowess, superimposes order on the raw material of nature and the surrounding society. The system builder is sovereign in the sense that actions are willful and effect change. Hughes identifies Henry Ford, Elmer Sperry, Thomas Edison, and Samuel Insull as archetypal system builders.
With the growing influence of sociology, women’s studies, and anthropology on historical literature during the 1980s, anthropocentric accounts of technology came under fierce attack. The focus of the history of technology shifted toward social and political structures that directed and determined the construction of technological knowledge. Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, and Donald MacKenzie established the social construction of technology as the field’s dominant methodology. The result—a precipitous decline of biography as a compelling genre—was reflected by the majority of winners of the Dexter Prize and the Usher Prize in the 1990s.19 For these authors, individual engineers and inventors had become reflections of larger social factors and institutional structures. Their choices were over-determined by and limited to the restricted possibilities of action offered by the historical trends within a given society.
A few academics on the frontiers of the history of technology, including David Nye, Donald Reid, and Bruno Latour, went so far as to question the very notion of human agency. In The Invented Self: An Antibiography, from Documents of Thomas A. Edison, Nye asserts that individuals are “divided selves who remain essentially unknowable in their endless variations.”20 Nye concludes that it is futile for the historian to attempt to construct a definitive person. The naive realist conception of personal coherence is but a myth, for the agent is decentered and dispersed by language. The best a historian can do, as in Reid’s attempts in Paris Sewers and Sewermen,21 is emphasize the centrality of rhetoric in communicating, interpreting, and representing objects and people, and in uncovering the unsystematic incoherence and flux of perceived reality. In the post-structuralist view of technology, biography as an effective tool of historical study is limited at best.
In view of the social constructivist and post-structuralist challenge, is there a place for biography in the history of technology? Before we agree to condemn the multitude of historical biographies to the methodological ash heap, let us consider some of the arguments.
In response to the post-structuralist challenge, self-inspection suggests that certain physical and mental continuities can be discerned apart from language. These continuities can be identified in others living around us, and also in those who came before us. When I began to study Grace Hopper, there appeared to be unlimited possibilities concerning what constituted her person. But as Hopper the historical figure is examined further, options are eliminated, patterns emerge, and identity surfaces. Granted, the essence of Hopper changes over time, gaps in her personality exist, and contradictions abound, but in the end much of her identity and her uniqueness can be salvaged.
If we accept that people are unique entities who can be recovered by historians, the next step is to identify their place in relation to the greater currents of social history. Though I believe that social constructivism provides a better understanding of society’s role in the development, dissemination, and implementation of technological knowledge, I suspect that this is only part of the story, for there is no society external to and separate from the individual. Every institution, every organization, and every government is an aggregate of unique individuals, each with his or her own “personal society” that is continuously refined and updated. Most importantly, when people become conscious of greater social trends, they have the capacity to press up against them, and, with time, even break through them. As Anthony Giddens writes in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), “the self is not a passive entity, determined by external influences: in forging their self-identities, no matter how local their specific contexts of action, individuals contribute to and directly promote social influences that are global in their consequences and implications.” I believe that Grace Hopper is such an individual, and that a biographical approach is the best methodological approach to her uniqueness and achieve greater understanding of the human condition. But I also have learned the lessons of the past 30 years, and I accept that Hopper is an individual embedded in an ever-changing historical landscape. Therefore, the narrative of this work has a distributed nature to it that attempts to highlight Hopper’s achievements from 1945 to 196022 within the context of the people and events that surrounded her. Sometimes the computer pioneer is the centerpiece of a chapter or subchapter; at other times her role is tangential to the story line. In this sense the literary style of distributed biography mirrors and supports my notion of distributed invention.
In the end, the career of this influential college professor turned naval officer turned inventor turned business executive serves as the ideal conduit for exploring the rise of the computer industry and the invention of computer programming in what we refer to today as the information age.
2 THE REBIRTH OF GRACE MURRAY HOPPER
“I can still remember December 7,” said Grace Hopper, reflecting on that fateful day in 1941. “The two of us were up in our study. We had a great double desk and we each had a window and solid books all around but there was a little radio up in the shop and I can remember the announcement of Pearl Harbor.”1 Hopper and her husband Vincent sat in utter disbelief as trusted voices described the surprise aerial attack by the Japanese that killed 2,403 Americans, wounded 1,178, destroyed 188 aircraft, and sent a significant part of the Pacific Fleet to the bottom of the harbor.
How could this occur? What happened to our homeland defenses? Why couldn’t we track the movements of the Japanese fleet? Didn’t we have adequate intelligence to warn of an attack? What does this mean for the nation? What does this mean to us? These were the immediate questions that weighed heavily on Grace and Vincent Hopper as they stayed glued to their radio like so many Americans. With each passing hour more complete details of the attack were reported, and in the months to follow history unfolded at a dizzying pace.
On 8 December, the United States and Britain declared war on the Japanese Empire. Three days later, Germany declared war on the United States. The Third Reich had consolidated its hold on Western Europe and had moved its forces to within 19 miles of Moscow in the East. In January, Germany launched “Operation Drumbeat,” a devastating submarine offen
sive against American shipping along the eastern coast of North America. In the Pacific, Japanese expansion spread to Hong Kong, Guam, Wake Island, Midway Island, and Singapore. In May 1942, U.S. forces surrendered the Philippine Islands.
On the home front, life transformed just as rapidly. In January the Emergency Price Control Act and Stabilization Act was passed, authorizing the president to control prices, wages, and public utility rates. The government initiated a system of rationing, which extended eventually to food and gasoline, while certain consumer goods, such as automobiles, were no longer produced. Finally, the War Powers Act granted the federal government draconian powers ranging from the control of the country’s transportation systems and the unlimited acquisition and disposition of property to the forced purchase by Federal Reserve Banks of government obligations.
Indeed, the events in Hawaii that Sunday morning profoundly changed America. Moreover, 7 December would also be the chronological fulcrum from which Grace Hopper’s own life would pivot. In the months that followed that fateful day, Grace Murray Hopper would leave her position as a tenured professor at Vassar College, divorce her husband, and join the U.S. Navy at the age of 36 years.
GRACE MURRAY HOPPER: MATHEMATICIAN AND TEACHER
Like many highly educated young American women during the 1930s,2 Grace Brewster Murray came from a well-established Anglo-Saxon family. Grace’s mother was an accomplished mathematician, and her father, a life insurance executive, made no distinction when it came to educating his son and his two daughters. The Murray home at 316 West 95th Street in New York City, filled with books, provided an environment in which young Grace’s academic ambitions were supported and encouraged.3
When Grace matriculated at Vassar College in 1924, it was customary for an affluent young American woman to complete her education, work a few years, then marry and start a family. Yet the thrill of academic achievement at Vassar led Grace to pursue a graduate degree in mathematics and physics at Yale University. By continuing her studies, Grace joined a growing minority of women who strove for more visible public positions.4
But even among this exceptional group of scholarly women, Grace stood out. First, she was one of only 396 Americans to be awarded doctorates in mathematics between 1930 and 1934, and the first woman to receive a mathematics degree from Yale. Second, whereas the vast majority of educated women found employment in elementary or secondary schools, Grace went on to become a college professor. Finally, many of the women who did secure college and university positions remained unmarried. Though the position of professor garnered respect, the broader society questioned a woman’s ability to balance a career with family life.5
In June 1930, Grace married Vincent Hopper, a quiet, studious man who supported his wife’s career ambitions. The two had first met in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, where the Murray and Hopper families had summer homes. It has been suggested that Vincent had been dating Grace’s sister.6
At the time of their marriage, Vincent Hopper was a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Columbia and was teaching at New York University. Together, the two academics created a life that permitted each to grow personally and professionally. During the academic year, they occupied an apartment on the same city street on which Grace had grown up. Among their neighbors were Grace’s brother and his wife, Grace’s sister and her husband, and Grace’s parents. Summers were spent in New Hampshire fixing up an old farmhouse the couple had bought with wedding money. When not working on the house, they were playing badminton and golf, or Grace was hooking rugs for the farm or knitting sweaters for friends.7
Supported by a loving family, Grace Murray Hopper completed her dissertation in 1934 and (as I have already noted) became the first woman to graduate from Yale with a doctorate in mathematics in the school’s 233-year history. Upon graduation she accepted a full-time academic position at her undergraduate alma mater, Vassar.
BUILDING A CAREER: TEACHING AT VASSAR
In 1861, Matthew Vassar, a brewer and a businessman, established Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, 75 miles north of New York City. Vassar’s vision at the time was to offer women a liberal arts education comparable to those offered by the best men’s colleges of the day. As a former Vassar student and professor, Grace Hopper followed in the footsteps of many pioneering alumni, including Ellen Swallow Richards (the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Maria Mitchell (the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences).
For a young professor beginning her academic career, Vassar offered a variety of advantages. The college provided a friendly environment with a significant proportion of female faculty. Furthermore, women occupied positions of authority within the administration. Though during the 1930s most women’s colleges emphasized teaching above research, Hopper would have ample opportunity to build a career that fulfilled her academic ambitions.
Like all new professors, Hopper would spend her first years working her way up the seniority ladder. “[O]f course [I] started with all of the courses nobody else wanted to teach,” she recalled.8 In addition to basic trigonometry and calculus, she taught the entire technical drawing curriculum, which included mechanical and architectural drawing and a lab on shading and perspective.
Aware of the harsh economic climate outside of the Vassar campus, Hopper did not complain even when faced with a teaching load of five or six courses per semester. Instead, Hopper took what came to her and turned it to her advantage. “[The courses] had gotten into terrible doldrums,” she recalled, “and I brought in new texts and new materials, and above all I brought in new applications. I began dumping in a little non-Euclidean [geometry] so they could begin to understand the new concepts of space. See, all of that was new then—all the Einstein stuff was brand new and exciting, and it was fun to try and bring it into the courses.”9
Hopper’s interdisciplinary approach to teaching sprang from her wide-ranging academic interests. Vassar faculty members were permitted to audit classes, and Hopper did not hesitate to do so. She attended classes in astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, zoology, economics, architecture, philosophy, and the history of scientific thought. Newfound knowledge quickly found its way into her courses. “[T]here was a continuing tendency throughout all those years of not just pure mathematics,” she recalled. “They learned their pure mathematics all right, but also I kept bringing in applications of it and uses of it.”10
Hopper’s innovative pedagogical approach had a dramatic effect on both students and faculty members. Students from a variety of departments flocked to her classes. Classes that had traditionally drawn few students began to attract 75 or more. Hopper had succeeded in making the sometimes-esoteric field of mathematics relevant for a wide array of majors. The mathematician Winifred Asprey, a Vassar undergraduate in the 1930s who had shared many mathematics classes with Grace Hopper, remembered her as “the most inspirational [person] you can possibly imagine.”11
Surprisingly, many faculty members were not pleased with Hopper’s approach. She recalled: “The younger group—older than I was but younger still—they disapproved of practically everything I did because I wasn’t doing the right things, and I was going off into things which were not mathematics.”12
In order to push through her curriculum revisions, Hopper allied herself with senior members of the faculty, including the department chair and the dean. “The dean liked it because it was interdisciplinary, which was just beginning to be talked about,” she recalled, “. . . and here was the math department which they had thought of as the most isolated of all beginning to draw people from the other departments and interrelate the work, so they liked that too.” Even Hopper’s former calculus professor from her days as a Vassar undergraduate, Gertrude Smith, approved of her unique approach: “She was probably the most old-fashioned of the lot . . . but she just viewed her child’s adventures with delight so to speak. She wasn’t quite sure it was orthodox, but it delighted her.”13
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p; Hopper’s first nine years as a college professor formed a foundation that would serve her well in the years to come. Intellectually, she had broken down traditionally rigid disciplines and had mastered a wide range of academic subjects. All the while, she saw mathematics as the link across all disciplines, and she found practical ways for her students to experience those connections directly. Moreover, she learned to be an effective public speaker, and she was credited by both students and fellow teachers as a great communicator and motivator. Astute at navigating Vassar’s bureaucracy, she became an agent of change in the face of institutional inertia.
By 1940, Professor Hopper had established herself as a respected member of the Vassar faculty. She had mastered the art of teaching, but part of her still yearned to move beyond the Poughkeepsie campus and rub shoulders with the elite in her field. That year she decided to apply for the Vassar faculty fellowship, which permitted recipients a one-year sabbatical in order to pursue research or coursework at another institution. Hopper chose to study with the celebrated mathematician Richard Courant at New York University.
Courant had been the director of the renowned Mathematics Institute at the University of Göttingen when Hitler had come to power. Because of his Jewish ancestry, the talented mathematician had been placed on leave in the spring of 1933, then temporarily reinstated in recognition of his distinguished service in the German Army during World War I. In the spring of 1934, with conditions deteriorating, Courant resigned. He left Germany and accepted a full professorship at NYU, where in 1936 he set out to build a department of applied mathematics in the Göttingen tradition.14