Human computer

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NACA High Speed Flight Station "Computer Room"

Before mechanical and electronic computers, the term "computer", in use from the mid 17th century, literally meant "one who computes": a person performing mathematical calculations. Teams of people or human computers were used to undertake long and often tedious calculations. The work was divided so that this could be done in parallel.

The approach was taken for astronomical and other complex calculations. Perhaps the first example of organized human computing was by the Frenchman Alexis Claude Clairaut (1713–1765), when he divided the computation to determine timing of the return of Halley's Comet with two colleagues, Joseph-Jérôme Le Lepart and Nicole-Reine Étable.

The Indian mathematician Radhanath Sikdar was employed as a "computer" for the Great Trigonometric Survey of India in 1840. It was he who first identified and calculated the height of the world's highest mountain, later called Mount Everest.

Human computers played integral roles in the World War II war effort in the United States, and because of the depletion of the male labor force due to the draft, many computers during WWII were women, frequently with degrees in mathematics. In the Manhattan Project, human computers, working with a variety of mechanical aids, assisted numerical studies of the complex formulae related to atomic fusion. And because the six people responsible for setting up problems on the ENIAC, the premiere general-purpose electronic digital computer built at the University of Pennsylvania during WWII, were drafted from a corpus of human computers, the world's first professional computer programmers were women, paving the way for careers in data processing as socially acceptable for women in an era of gender roles. (These six computers-turned-computer-programmers were Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas.)

Following World War II, the NACA used human computers in flight research to transcribe raw data from celluloid film and oscillograph paper and then, using slide rules and electric calculators, reduce it to standard engineering units.

The term has also been applied to individuals with prodigious powers of mental arithmetic, also known as mental calculators.