Maria Kirch was a very early female human computer. Working in the late 1600s into the early 1700s, with her husband, she created astronomical tables that while mainly used for astrological purposes were also useful for navigation. They computed the future times of sunrises, the phases of the moon, the positions of planets, eclipses and the like for calendars. This was part of his job as astronomer for the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Along the way she became the first woman to discover a comet. When her husband died, she asked to take over his job – it was common for widows to take over a family business in this way. Having done the work with her husband she was of course eminently qualified. However, she was refused, despite having support from the great mathematician and scientist, Gottfried Leibnitz. A less qualified man was given the job instead. She did continue her work, however, doing astronomical observations and calculations almost to her death in 1720
20th century human computers (working for NASA, for example) moved on to become programmers once they were invented so capable of doing the actual calculations, However, no computers existed in the 1600s and 1700s. If they had perhaps Maria would have naturally become a programmer, too, coding the computations needed to take over her work. She certainly had the skills. Charles Babbage who also worked as a human computer a century or so later computing similar tables for shipping navigation, went on to try to create a mechanical computer to do the job for him. Mathematician Ada Lovelace, of course, then became interested in writing algorithms for it and is sometimes called “the first programmer”. In fact, Kirch’s supporter, Leibnitz, did actually design a computer. It worked using a Binary system of marble runs. However, it was really only a thought experiment and he did not, as far as we know, attempt to build it. He did create mechanical calculators including the first massed produced one. They would have helped take some of the tedium of this kind of calculation, but they were not programmable. If only he had built his computer maybe Maria Kirch would have become the first programmer…
by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
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