vla22: photo of Atli's throne, Torcello, Venice (Default)
So obviously being on strike means I can work on my project on the Cavendish "computors" and other women in early computing in Cambridge. You know, the project that's not part of my job or PhD, but which I'm doing anyway, because I have a fantastic opportunity.

I'm seeking funding for a summer student. I've got plans for what they can work on. There are other things people could help me out with, especially if you're in Cambridge. Many of these things will require visiting libraries and other University sites; these should only be done when we're not on strike, so we're not crossing the picket line.

1. See if there's a way of setting up an access-controlled wiki, ideally hosted on University servers, using Raven/Shibboleth for authentication. The reason for access control is that later on, we may be collecting personal data, and I'd need to show that we'd used proper data security processes to ensure that people didn't have access to anything inappropriate. At this stage of the project, we'd be gathering data that we're entitled to see anyway, but this may change. This is quite a high priority, as it will be useful to share what we've looked at.

2. Find out where Departmental photos are stored (for Physics and the Computer Lab).

3. Find out if the Computer Lab (sorry, Department of Computer Science and Technology) or UIS holds any archives on the staff that were employed. Note: please don't try to look at this data if they hold it - I'd need to sort out proper GDPR stuff for that. At this stage, it would be useful to know what they hold.

4. Look at the Reporter for 1949-1975ish for: lists of Faculty Members, lists of University Officers, and lists of PhD awards (i.e. the lists of name and thesis title). You are looking for the women, or theses from the MRC, Crystallography and Radio Astronomy fields that may have had a substantial computing component (or theses from the Computer Lab by women). There will be some obvious easy targets; a full survey will take forever and will basically involve living in the UL and summoning up all the theses from the period and seeing whether someone wrote something relevant. It can be done over time, but there are probably some easy ways in. It may also be interesting to record gender statistics (I'm assuming that at this period, it may be easy to identify women in many lists, as they'll be prefixed by Miss or Mrs.)

5. Look at the theses, or at least get the catalogue number for future summoning. Not all theses will be readable.

6. Look at MRC and Crystallography papers for computing. This probably involves finding the major journals in the field, hoping they're online, and searching for EDSAC, EDSAC II and TITAN, in the first instance.

If anyone's able to make a start on any of that, it would be helpful!
vla22: photo of Atli's throne, Torcello, Venice (Default)
While not directly relevant to the history of the "Cavendish Computors", the web pages of the Department for Computer Science and Technology (formerly the Computer Lab, formerly formerly the Mathematical Laboraty) celebrating the EDSAC, EDSAC II and TITAN computers do have some useful information for those of us seeking the contribution women made in the early years of (scientific) computing.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/EDSAC99/

There are few things we can learn from scanning the material. Firstly, there have always been women at the Lab, as users, students, and staff. Not always a lot of them, but they're there. Secondly, they're not much remembered by the men - if pressed, people tend to recall the men who went on to make great names (Wheeler, Swinnerton-Dyer, Dijkstra and so on). The women are remembered by some men, though - usually those who went on to marry them! This imbalance is also apparent in the list of speakers for the day - in a list of over 13 speakers, only one is a woman (Karen Spärck-Jones - who subsequently became a professor). And in the pages listing people's recollection of the early days of computing in the University, the majority are male.

However, the male domination of computing that was very commonplace when I was first an undergraduate in the late 1990s (2-3% of students doing Computer Science were female) wasn't necessarily true in the early days. The photo of the Mathematical Laboratory people from May 1949 has three rows of people in it: one whole row is women, and there are two other women on the front row. (H. Smith, C. Mumford, H. Pye, A. Thomas, E. McKee (Eileen Breakwell), J. Steel, R. Bonham-Carter, B. Worsley).
Other women who were involved were Dr Liz Waldram, Liz Swann (later Howe), Ruth Feinstein (later Loshak) - who did some of the programming of EDSAC II for the first practical exhibition of the aperture synthesis technique in Radio Astronomy (First Results of Radio Star Observations Using the Method of Aperture Synthesis, P. F. Scott, M. Ryle, A. Hewish, MNRAS 1961, vol 122, 95S), Judy Bowers (later Thomas), Janet Richards (later Linington), Marya Goldman, Joyce Blackler (later Wheeler), Rachel Brittorn (later Wroth), Annette Haworth, Jenifer Haselgrove (later Leech), Diana Catton (later Belcham). Judy Bailey was I think dead by this time, but she was certainly an early user.

There are almost certainly more women who did the Diploma that the Lab offered, and did PhDs with the group, if the Lab is anything like the Cavendish (Jenifer Haselgrove and Diana Catton were diploma and research students, respectively). Obviously, some of these people supported staff in other departments. That was Janet Richards' job. Judy Thomas and Eileen McKee were operators, and they may have worked with other departments. Judy Bailey, Liz Waldram and Ruth Feinstein all did work for the Cavendish Radio Astronomy group, as noted in the acknowledgements to papers and theses.

There are other hints of the contributions women made to the early days of Cambridge computing. (All quotations are from https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/EDSAC99/reminiscences, accessed 04/12/2019)

Robin Stokes noted: "We were shown the assembly line, with girls soldering military surplus acorn valves into arrays of logic gates."
This refers to the early construction of EDSAC.

Peter Felgett: "An abiding memory is of a woman emerging from her office and declaring to the assembled multitude: ' I want a man, with long strong arms.' It emerged that she had lost a program tape down the back of a heavy desk."
From the fact that she had an office on site, I deduce she was probably a member of staff.

Ruth Loshak noted:; " in those days you were expected to stop working when you had a baby".
She was working in the late 50s/early 60s; a few years later, Dr Liz Waldram noted to me in conversation that she was able to work part-time around having her children, in part because there were so few qualified people who could write programs. That may have been a cultural difference between the Mathematical Laboratory (which could presumably put its (ex-)research students to the programming tasks), and the Cavendish Laboratory, which probably preferred its students to spend more time on physics experiments (or building telescopes) and less time programming.

A little later, Judy Thomas observed of TITAN: " It was run 24 hours a day by teams of operators (many more of us now and nearly all called Sue), and a permanent night shift."
This suggests to me that there were plenty of women working in the Lab from the early days after the Second World War until at least the early 1970s; however, we don't know about most of them. Some of that may be that they were employed at "routine" work, and didn't get a chance to shine. Some of them were pushed out of the workforce or sidelined when they had children. I'm sure some of them worked either in Cambridge or elsewhere, and found that the men were promoted above them, or got the better opportunities.

But they were always there.
vla22: photo of Atli's throne, Torcello, Venice (Default)

When conscripted workers returned to Cambridge after the Second World War, some of them brought with them knowledge of some of the technological advances in Radar and computing.

The histories of the Labs have focussed on the dynamic men who directed the work: Watson & Crick (and later Aaron Klug) at the MRC unit (initially part of the Cavendish), Mott in High Energy Physics, (HEP), Martin Ryle in the Astrophysics Group (AP), and Maurice Wilkes, Director of the Mathematical Laboratory. All of the scientists won Nobel Prizes, and much of their work was facilitated by computation, first done by people, later by computers.

 

And these computers were often women, hired as "Computors", or "Technical Officers"* if they were lucky, first to do calculations by hand, and later to write computer programs. There were other women employed in technical roles, as "Scanners" for looking at photographic plates for HEP, looking for the traces left by sub-atomic particles, as draughtswomen, drawing contour maps and other technical diagrams, and also some research students.

 

* This job title still exists in the University; I'm employed as a Technical Officer.

 

The employment of women as Computors was common: at NASA, human computors calculated orbital trajectories for the early space program*; the UK Met Office employed computers, as evidenced by this guide from 1916: https://twitter.com/verityallan/status/1164850561214296065 , some of whom were probably women; at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, computers calculated the position of stars from photographic plates.

 

* As made famous by the book and film, Hidden Figures.

 

In the Cavendish, three main groups hired Computors: crystallography, the MRC (before it was spun off into a separate organisation), and astrophysics. All three groups were doing work (x-ray crystallography or interferometry) that involved Fourier Transforms. Later, they programmed the computers to do data analysis using the Fast Fourier Transform. These computers were the computers designed by the (then) Mathematical Laboratory, and included EDSAC II and TITAN.

 

However, despite their essential contribution to data analysis, the Computors were not likely to feature on papers. Much of this was the convention of the time, and some of this was down to a group culture (in Astrophysics at least) that did not encourage elucidation of the computational methods used. Since many of the scientific "computers" were also women, there may also have been some level of gender bias.

 

Whatever the cause, Computors did not get authorships on papers, and only ralrely are listed in the Acknowledgements section. We can look at a paper from 1962 as an example: Ryle, M. and Neville, Ann C., A Radio Survey of the North Polar Region with a 4.5 Minute of Arc Pencil-beam System, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 1962: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/link_gateway/1962MNRAS.125...39R/ADS_PDF

This paper is a seminal paper on earth-rotation aperture synthesis. It is a full practical demonstration of the technique, using the 178MHz telescope to collect the data, and the EDSAC II computer to process the data.

 

The electronic computer was essential - it would have taken too long to do the calculations by hand. Some of the program was written by Ann Neville, one of Martin Ryle's research students, and co-author on the paper. However, the paper also contains what may be the first reference to a practical Fast Fourier Transform, devised by David Wheeler of the Mathematical Laboratory.* This feat doesn't earn him an author credit, though; he just gets mentioned in the acknowledgements. This is something that today would certainly earn him a co-author credit, and then a ton of references when his work was used for other applications.

 

Also mentioned in the Acknowledgements was Mrs E Waldram, for the "photographic output". This actually involved some early work on computer graphics, to output the data on a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) and then photograph that.

 

Not mentioned in the acknowledgements at all is the team of people known as "the girls in the attic". They did the work to draw the fantastic map of the North Polar region, joining several photographic plates together into a hand-drawn map. Until good printing of computer graphics was possible, the "girls in the attic" routinely produced contour maps and other technical drawings. Very rarely did they get credit in the acknowledgements. (They did get credited in at least one PhD thesis in the Astrophysics group, by a man who will remain nameless.)

 

* I'm trying to confirm that this is a version of the Fast Fourier Transform, rather than something similar but distinct. This is still a work in progress.

 

I have looked at papers primarily from the 1950s to 1970s - by the 1980s, the convention was changing, and Computers and Technical Officers were more likely to have substantial contributions recognised on papers. I have a list on ADS of the early papers from the Astrophysics Group, which I have used as a reference: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/public-libraries/KkZ1AAqVRsakG7N87AKV2A

 

I am keen to find out more about these women, and the techniques they employed, especially the computing techniques used. I work on the Square Kilometre Array, which will produce huge amounts of data, and memory management is going to be important again. We may be able to reuse some of the insights from the limitations of early computers to improve software for cutting-edge science in the 2020s. As well as the computers, I'm looking at the female research students in the Radio Astronomy group, as women have been working in the field for a long time. We just don't know about most of them.


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Verity Allan

September 2021

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