As a student I had a statistics professor, Geoff Jowett, who, during WWII, had been in charge of a large number of computers in London. There was nothing electronic about them. They were numerate (usually middle class) women, who spent their working lives punching numbers into wide carriage mechanical adding machines.

The objective (although there may have been others as well) was to calculate missile trajectories so that Tommy knew where to point his gun, so as to take out the Bosch.

We have had a bit of stuff recently about Rosie the Riveter, who built ships, aircraft (and maybe even admirals' safety razors) to Help Win the War:



A new documentary has tracked down the "Top Secret Rosies" who performed calculations that may have been critical in winning the war.

In 1942 a secret US military program was launched to recruit women to the war effort. But unlike the efforts to recruit Rosie to the factory, this search targeted female mathematicians who would become human 'computers' for the US Army. From the bombing of Axis Europe to the assaults on Japanese strongholds, women worked six days a week, around-the-clock creating ballistics tables that proved crucial to Allied success. Rosie made the weapons, but the female computers made them accurate. When the first electronic computer (ENIAC) was developed to aid the Army’s calculation efforts, six of these women were tapped to become its first programmers.

Top Secret Rosies incorporates the stories of four very different women who worked as human computers at the University of Pennsylvania from 1942-1946, but does more than simply document the factual lives of a literally ‘dying breed’- the participants of the WWII era. Using the 16x9 HD screen as a canvas, the project attempts to capture the opportunities and exhilaration of the times but also the moral dilemma inherent in their work as these human ‘computers’ labored night and day to create the mathematical computations that made every Allied bomb and bullet more deadly.

Regrettably it has failed to contact the thousands of now elderly British women who toiled under the instructions of Jowett and other mathematicians, to give their nation a competitive edge.