Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers during the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research (review)

This ambitious book retells a familiar story by introducing new evidence and new perspectives. The story is the origins of American computer development in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The new evidence includes archival sources from academia and industry. The new perspective is constructivist and postconstructivist theory. The results are simultaneously predictable and illuminating.

Akera’s book is not so much a revised narrative as it is a succession of case studies, some familiar and some original. Conventional topics such as ENIAC, John von Neumann, Whirlwind, and time-sharing mix with less well-known stories about the National Bureau of Standards, IBM’s “Applied Science Representatives” and its user group “Share,” and academic computing at the University of Michigan. The chapters lack a consistent narrative thread, but they nonetheless succeed in making one of the author’s major points: the story of American computer development surrounding World War II is far more complex and multifaceted than the existing literature allows. Furthermore, the story entailed more complex interactions among government, business, and academia than previous histories have captured. Akera displays an exceptional mastery of the technical issues involved and is able to draw interpretive inferences not just from what the principals said about their work, but also from the substance of the work itself. His understanding of mathematics, electrical engineering, computer architecture, and programming gives his work a rare tone of authority and insight. All the chapters benefit from extensive reading in primary sources; although, there are times when further reading in the secondary literature might have provided a fuller context.

The author fashions the empirical evidence into analytical case studies by applying the constructivist and postconstructivist theory. No single conceptualization dominates, though Bruno Latour’s notions of “translation” and “centers of calculation” come into play at multiple points. Rather, Akera chooses theories eclectically and applies them to suit the topic. Embracing, for example, the “symmetry postulate,” the belief that the voices of all the major participants in a story deserve to be heard, Akera introduces more biographical information on figures such as John Mauchly and John von Neumann than usually appears in this kind of analysis. The failure to exploit Mitchell Waldrop’s masterful The Dream Machine (2001) for similar biographical insights into J. C. R. Licklider’s contribution to time-sharing only emphasizes how powerful this technique can be in theory and how difficult to achieve in the real world of a four-hundred-page monograph.

The author claims early on that his study reveals a metonymic relationship between esoteric knowledge and its supporting institutions, but this thesis recedes from view as the text proceeds. The most salient argument behind the book’s eight case studies is that from the early 1930s through the mid-1960s, American computer development “went from a loosely configured ecology [of knowledge] to a ‘trading zone’ to a well-ordered network” (108). The concept of an “ecology of knowledge,” which the author associates primarily with historian of science Charles Rosenberg, operates on the assumption that technology is fundamentally about knowing how to manipulate the material world. “The trading zone” is a concept introduced by Peter Galison to explore the mechanisms by which knowledge from different fields comes into an identifiable marketplace, to be translated and exchanged with self-selecting customers. Akera is less explicit about what he means by a “well-ordered network,” though he clearly believes that what came to be called computer science had reached that level by the middle of the 1960s. The author also refrains from defining clearly what a computer is, highlighting the difficulty in this kind of study in avoiding the presentist trap of anachronistically and teleologically projecting back onto historical actors modern concepts of what they were about.

This brief summary does not begin to encompass the theoretical range or complexity that Akera...