Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [108]
Computing by Machine
Not only the atomic era but also the computer era had its start in those years. Scattered about the nation’s military and civilian laboratories, a few researchers focused exclusively on the means of calculating instead of the calculations themselves. At Los Alamos, in particular, the demand for numerical computation grew more intense than anywhere else on earth. The means were mechanical and now partly electronic, though the crucial technological key, the transistor, remained to be invented at the decade’s end. Calculating technology became a hybrid with machine parts and human parts: people carrying cards from place to place served as the memories and logical-branching units of near computers that stretched across rows and columns of desks.
The bomb project could draw on the best technology available anywhere, but the best technology offered little to the working scientist. The manufacturers of such equipment—the International Business Machines Corporation already preeminent among them—considered the scientific market to be negligible. It could not imagine the vast clientele that would soon consume as much calculating capacity as could be created: for forecasting weather, designing engines, analyzing proteins, scheduling airplanes, and simulating everything from ecosystems to heart valves. Business was thought to be the sole potential consumer for business machines, and business meant accounting, which meant addition and subtraction. Multiplication seemed a luxury, although it might be necessary to multiply monthly sales by twelve. Division by machine was esoteric. Computation of mortgage payments and bond yields could be managed by humans with standard tables.
The workhorse of scientific calculating was the Marchant calculator, a clattering machine nearly as large as a typewriter, capable of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and with some difficulty dividing numbers of up to ten digits. (At first, to save money, the project ordered slower, eight-digit versions as well. They were rarely used.) In these machines a carriage spun around, propelled at first by a hand crank and later by an electric motor. Keys and levers pushed the carriage left or right. Counter and register dials displayed painted digits. There were rows and columns of keys for entering numbers, a plus bar and a minus bar, a multiplier key and a negative multiplier key, shift keys, and a key for stopping the machine when division went out of control, as it often did. Mechanical arithmetic was no simple affair. With all its buttons and linkages the Marchant was not quite as powerful as the giant Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, invented in England a century before by Charles Babbage in hopes of generating the printed tables of numbers on which navigators, astronomers, and mathematicians had to rely. Not only did Babbage solve the problem of carrying digits from one decimal place to the next; his machines actually used punched cards, borrowed from mechanical looms, to convey data and instructions. In the era of steam power, few of his contemporaries appreciated the point.
The Marchants took a hard pounding at Los Alamos. Metal parts wore thin and came out of alignment. The officially nonexistent laboratory was poorly suited to field-service visits by the manufacturer’s repair crews, so standard procedure required the shipping of broken machines back to California. Eventually three or four machines were in the pipeline at any one time. Feynman, frustrated, turned to Nicholas Metropolis, a mustached Greek mathematician who later became an authority on