{"id":29258,"date":"2014-12-18T00:04:15","date_gmt":"2014-12-18T05:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29258"},"modified":"2015-02-07T21:16:16","modified_gmt":"2015-02-08T02:16:16","slug":"admiral-grace-hopper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/12\/18\/admiral-grace-hopper\/","title":{"rendered":"Admiral Grace Hopper"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US Naval Institute posted an article about the one and only Admiral Grace Hopper<\/a> earlier this month to mark her birthday:<\/p>\n

The typical career arc of a naval officer may run from 25-30 years. Most, however, don\u2019t start at age 35. Yet when it comes to Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, well, the word \u201ctypical\u201d just doesn\u2019t apply.<\/p>\n

Feisty. Eccentric. Maverick. Brilliant. Precise. Grace Hopper embodied all of those descriptions and more, but perhaps what defined her as much as anything else was the pride she had in wearing the Navy uniform for 43 years. Ironically, Rear Adm. Grace Hopper \u2014 \u201cAmazing Grace\u201d as she was known \u2014 had to fight to get into the Navy.<\/p>\n

Grace Brewster Murray was born into a well-off family in New York on Dec. 9, 1906. She could have followed what many of her peers did during those times: attending college for a year or two, getting married then devoting their lives to their families and volunteer work.<\/p>\n

Instead, Grace\u2019s path would be less traveled. Encouraged to explore her innate curiosity on how things worked, a 7-year-old Grace dismantled all of the family\u2019s alarm clocks trying to put them back together again. Rather than banishment from the practice, she was allowed one to practice on.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

When she joined the WAVES in December 1943, Lt. j.g. Grace Hopper was 37 years old. Williams noted that after graduating at the top of her class of 800 officer candidates in June 1944, Hopper paid homage to Alexander Wilson Russell, her great-grandfather, the admiral who apparently took a \u201cdim view of women and cats\u201d in the Navy and laid flowers on his grave to \u201ccomfort and reassure him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hopper was sent to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University under the guidance of Howard Aiken. The Harvard physics and applied mathematics professor helped create the first Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), better known as Mark I. He ran a lab where design, testing, modification and analysis of weapons were calculated. Most were specially trained women called computers. \u201cSo the first \u2018computers\u2019 were women who did the calculating on desk calculators,\u201d Williams said. And the time it took for the computers to calculate was called \u201cgirl hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

What happened next put Hopper on a new path that would define the rest of her life, according to a passage in the book Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists in the U.S. Navy during World War II<\/em> also by Williams.<\/p>\n

On July 2, 1944, Hopper reported to duty and met Aiken.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a computing engine,\u201d Aiken snapped at Hopper, pointing to the Mark I. \u201cI would be delighted to have the coefficients for the interpolation of the arc tangent by next Thursday.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hopper was a mathematician, but what she wasn\u2019t was a computer programmer. Aiken gave her a codebook, and as Hopper put it, a week to learn \u201chow to program the beast and get a program running.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hopper overcame her lack of programming skills the same way she always tackled other obstacles; by being persistent and stopping at nothing to solve problems. She eventually would become well-versed in how the machine operated, all 750,000 parts, 530 miles of wire and 3 million wire connections crammed in a machine that was 8-feet tall and 50-feet wide.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US Naval Institute posted an article about the one and only Admiral Grace Hopper earlier this month to mark her birthday: The typical career arc of a naval officer may run from 25-30 years. Most, however, don\u2019t start at age 35. Yet when it comes to Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, well, the word \u201ctypical\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5,15,13,230],"tags":[109,1012,30,43],"class_list":["post-29258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-military","category-technology","category-usa","category-ww2","tag-computers","tag-gracehopper","tag-navy","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7BU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29259,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29258\/revisions\/29259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}