by Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London.
Jean Bartik (born Betty Jean Jennings) was one of six women who programmed “ENIAC” (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), one of the earliest electronic programmable computers. The work she and her colleagues did in the 1940s had a huge impact on computer science however their contribution went largely unrecognised for 40 years.
Jean Bartik – born 27 December 1924; died on this day, 23 March 2011
Born in Missouri USA in December 1924 to a family of teachers in Betty (as she was then known) showed promise in Mathematics, graduating from her high school in the summer of 1941 aged 16 with the highest marks in maths ever seen at her school. She began her degree in Maths and English at her local teachers’ college (which is now Northwest Missouri State University) but everything changed dramatically a few months in when the US became involved in the Second World War. The men (teachers and students) were called up for war service leaving a dwindling department and her studies were paused, resuming only in 1943 when retired professors were brought in to teach; she graduated in January 1945, the only person in her year to graduate in Maths.
Although her family encouraged her to become a local maths teacher she decided to seek more distant adventures. The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (~1,000 miles away) had put out a call for people with maths skills to help with the war effort, she applied and was accepted. Along with over 80 other women she was employed to calculate, using advanced maths including differential calculus equations, accurate trajectories of bullets and bombs (ballistics) for the military. She and her colleagues were ‘human computers’ (people who did calculations before the word meant what it does today) creating range tables, columns of information that told the US army where they should point their guns to be sure of hitting their targets. This was complex work that had to take account of weather conditions as well as more obvious things like distance and size of the gun barrel.
Even with 80-100 women working on every possible combination of gun size and angle it still took over a week to generate one data table so the US Army was obviously keen to speed things up as much as possible. They had previously given funding in 1943 to John Mauchly (a physicist) and John Presper Eckert (an electrical engineer) to build a programmable electronic calculator – ENIAC – which would automate the calculations and give them a huge speed advantage. By 1945 the enormous new machine, which took up a room (as computers tended to do in those days) consisted of several thousand vacuum tubes, weighed 30 tonnes and was held together with several million soldered joints. It would be programmed with punched cards with holes punched at different positions in each card allowing a current to pass (or not pass, if no hole present) through a particular set of cables connected through a plugboard (like old-fashioned telephone exchanges).
From the now 100 women working as human computers in the department six were selected to become the machine’s operators – a role that was exceptional. There were no manuals available and ‘programming’, as we know it today, didn’t yet exist – it was much more physical. Not only did the ‘ENIAC six’ have to correctly wire each cable they had to fully understand the machine’s underlying blueprints and electronic circuits to make it work as expected. Repairs could involve crawling into the machine to fix a broken wire or vacuum tube.
World War 2 actually ended in September 1945 before ENIAC was brought into full service, but being programmable (which meant rewiring the cables) it would soon be put to other uses. Jean really enjoyed her time working on ENIAC and said later that she’d “never since been in as exciting an environment. We knew we were pushing back frontiers” but she was working at a time when men’s jobs and achievements were given more credit than women’s.
In February 1946 ENIAC was unveiled to the press with its (male) inventors demonstrating its impressive calculating speeds and how much time could be saved compared with people performing the calculations with mechanical desk calculators. While Jean and some of the other women were in attendance (and appear in press photographs of the time) the women were not introduced, their work wasn’t celebrated, they were not always correctly identified in the photographs and were even not invited to the celebratory dinner after the event – as Jean said in a later interview (see the second video (YouTube) below) “We were sort of horrified!”.
In December 1946 she married William Bartik (an engineer) and over the next few years was instrumental in the programming and development of other early computers. She also taught others how to program them (an early computer science teacher!). She often worked with her husband too, following him to different cities for work. However her husband took on a new role in 1951 and the company’s policy was that wives were not allowed to work in the same place. Frustrated, Jean left computing for a while and also took a career break to raise her family.
In the late 1960s she returned to the field of computer science and for several years she blended her background in Maths and English, writing technical reports on the newer ‘minicomputers’ (still quite large compared to modern computers but you could fit more of them in a room). However the company she worked for was sold off and she was made redundant in 1985 at the age of 60. She couldn’t find another job in the industry which she put down to age discrimination and she spent her remaining career working in real estate (selling property or land). She died, aged 86 on 23 March 2011.
Jean’s contribution to computer science remained largely unknown to the wider world until 1986 when Kathy Kleinman (an author, law professor and programmer) decided to find out who the women in these photographs were and rediscovered the pioneering work of the ENIAC six.
The ENIAC six women were Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances (Betty) Snyder Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Frances Bilas Spence, and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum.
Further reading
Jean Bartik (Wikipedia)
ENIAC (Wikipedia)
The ENIAC Programmers Project – Kathy Kleinman’s project which uncovered the women’s role
Betty Jean Jennings Bartik (biography by the University of St Andrews)
This blog is funded through EPSRC grant EP/W033615/1.
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