During the summer of 1948, after my freshman year at MIT, I
got a job at the ARMA Corporation in Brooklyn. It was by sheer luck.
I had visited the company where I'd worked as an office boy before
college, just to say hello. One of
the secretaries, hearing that I was looking for a summer job, referred me to a
friend at ARMA, who was an MIT alumnus.
At 18, I was apparently already part of the MIT old boys' network (there
were very few women then at MIT), for after a brief interview I was hired.
ARMA, a military contractor, was then developing an
electromechanical fire-control computer for calculating the settings needed by
a submarine's torpedo so as to make it hit a ship whose coordinates, speed and
bearing had been entered into the computer along with other data.
Electromechanical computers are analog devices that do computations using a
mass of motors, shafts, gears and other components. Each such computer was built for a special purpose, unlike
later general-purpose electronic digital computers. (There were then only a handful of digital computers in the
world, each taking a roomful of equipment.) The torpedo-firing problem would be the only one ARMA's
computer would be able to solve.
My job at first seemed colossally boring. It was to manually calculate the
answers to problems the computer would be asked to solve after it was built, to
make sure that it was functioning properly. Sitting eight hours a day doing such calculations didn't
seem like it would be much fun.
But the job paid $27 per week, more than my college-graduate sister was
making in the nascent TV industry, so who was I to complain?
For those who know my current-day aversion to things
military, I should give some background for this decidedly war-oriented
work. By the end of World War II
in 1945, Eastern Europe was under the control of the USSR. Defeated Germany had been divided into
four zones, administered respectively by the US, the UK, France and the
USSR. Berlin, an enclave deep within
the USSR's zone, was similarly divided into four sectors. The US, UK and France accessed and
supplied their Berlin sectors through specified railway lines, roads and canals
crossing the USSR's zone of Germany, as well as by air.
In June 1948, the Soviets suddenly blockaded all surface
connections to the western allies' sectors in Berlin, thereby trying to make
the western part of the city fully dependent on the USSR for provisioning. That precipitated the first Cold War
crisis. The US and UK, unwilling
to give the Soviets such a stranglehold, pledged to supply the western sectors by air. During the ensuing
11 months, the Berlin Airlift flew an amazing 200,000 flights to the city, each
day providing West Berliners up to 4700 tons of necessities such as fuel and
food. As I daily rode the subway
to Brooklyn, I read the New York Times' dispatches on the blockade, along with
analyses that pondered whether a hot war with the Soviet Union would
erupt. I felt I was doing a
minimal but meaningful job in this internationally tense context.
As it turned out, the Soviets backed down the following May
and lifted the blockade. A few
months later, Germany was formally divided into the Federal Republic of Germany
(West Germany} and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), with Berlin
now divided between the two new countries. Both remained formally occupied
until 1955. I was caught by the irony
that, right before my eyes, the western part of a despised former enemy was
emerging as an ally of the West, an indispensable "bastion of
freedom" against the communist threat.
Back to my job at ARMA. In those days, manual calculations involved parsing a set of
equations into a number of steps, calculating each step, recording its
intermediate answer on paper, and slowly working up through these steps until
getting a final answer. Each step was carried out by referencing printed tables
of mathematical functions and using a desktop Marchant mechanical
calculator to do the arithmetic.
Compared to modern electronic calculators, the Marchant was molasses:
using a complicated system of rotating gears, it took seconds for an addition
or subtraction and ten seconds or more for multiplication and division. Grinding through even a simple set of
equations could take hours, and was very prone to errors.
I had never used a Marchant, but once I familiarized myself
with it, I set about the calculations that I was asked to do. The trouble was that the answers seemed
crazy, for they weren't directing the torpedoes toward the target's coordinates
that I had started with. I was
pretty sure that I was making mistakes, and was terrified, spending many days
doing fruitless recalculations, and sleepless nights wondering how I could be
so in error.
After what seemed like an eternity, I understood the
problem. The new computer for
submarines was based on equations similar to those designed into an existing
ARMA computer that controlled the firing of torpedoes from destroyers. But the two situations had a critical
difference. A destroyer launched
torpedoes from port and starboard, a submarine from bow and stern. The equations for the two cases
therefore should have reflected the very different launching symmetries the two
types of ship had with respect to their forward-to-aft axes, but they
didn't. On probing, I discovered
that the difference involved a single plus sign that should have been a
minus sign in the equations I had been given; a change of sign could be
implemented in the fire-control computer for submarines by adding a single gear
to its design, changing the rotation of a single shaft. I redid my calculations with the new
sign, and they suddenly gave sensible answers.
At first, no one believed me. But I persisted in working up through my boss to his boss,
and convinced him. The new gear
was added to the computer. I was
ecstatic—my very first contribution to a real-world engineering design!
As you might imagine, I was fixated on gears that summer, so
they became a metaphorical theme for my thinking. I thought of myself as
up-shifting from student engineer to professional engineer. I thought of the country's policy toward
Germany as slamming into reverse. Change was exciting, and vivid in my imagination.
That exuberant youth was six decades away from being
jaded with change and subscribing to the proverb Plus ça change, plus c'est la
même chose. For him it was still Plus
ça change, plus c'est une bonne chose.