We work from morn till night, For computingis our duty; We're faithful and polite, And our record book's a beauty; With Crelle and Gauss, Chauvenet and Peirce, We labor hard all day; We add, subtract, multiply and divide, And we never have time to play. (from The Observatory Pinafore by Winslow Upton, 1879) Human computers certainly did work hard all day, and had the aches and pains to show for it: elbow joints inflamed from cranking calculator handles, or fingers and thumbs cramped from pencilling figure after figure on to 'graph paper. For two centuries the modern scientific enterprise was built on their efforts. Yet every time a logarithm was looked up, or the value of a Bessel function checked, a debt was incurred that was rarely acknowledged. And now the human computer has vanished from history.
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