Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (review)

Grace Murray Hopper had taught mathematics at Vassar and won her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale when World War II changed everything. In 1944, aged thirty-seven, she joined the navy. As a newly minted lieutenant (jg) in the navy's WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), she was assigned to Harvard University's Computation Laboratory, which the navy's Bureau of Ships had just taken over. The laboratory was home to the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, Mark I, an electromechanical machine developed between 1937 and 1943 by IBM. The pioneering machine and the pioneering computer scientist made history. The navy continued to use Mark I for gunnery and ballistic calculations until 1959, long after it was obsolete. The navy continued to use Hopper far longer. Because of her vital role in the development of computers, her active and inactive naval career extended an unprecedented forty-three years until 1986, her eightieth year.

Before the war and even during its early years, "computers" were not machines but rather the trained women specialists whose task segments were termed "girl hours." By the thousands, they did the seemingly endless numerical calculations required at every point in weapons development. But mechanical computation was under way. At least a dozen one-of-a-kind computing machines were in development in the United States and Europe when the United States entered World War II. Of these, the best known was the IBM Mark I, a five-ton behemoth with 760,000 separate parts. It was a product of the university-industry-military effort.

Hopper moved from university to industry in 1949, soon to become a driving force behind advanced programming techniques for commercial computers. As a navy reservist—intermittently on active status—her visibility in the new scientific field suited the navy well. She was promoted regularly with great ceremony, retiring with the rank of rear admiral.

Computers had become more than prototypes by 1953, the United States emerging as the center of pioneering research on automatic programming. Hopper had the credentials—knowledge, imagination, and power—to persuade the reluctant that they would benefit from the swiftly developing technology. In the cold war, particularly after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, military use of computers increased dramatically, leading to calls for uniformity and coordination among proliferating autonomous programs. Hopper thought computers would evolve even more rapidly than had airplanes; she presciently encouraged standardized languages and forward-looking policies to manage the swift succession of computer generations. Her most important contributions flowed from her concerns to make the ever-broadening applications for the new technology easier to use.

This brief overview of Hopper's career derives only partly from Kathleen Williams's book, which is complicated by a mixed chronology and a plethora of acronyms. Billed as a biography—it appears in the Naval Institute's Library of Naval Biography (the library's only woman)—Grace Hopper omits too much to stand as a proper life story. This is not Williams's first look at Hopper. She also profiled Hopper in a previous book, Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II (2001). This new work goes well beyond World War II, but remains focused on Hopper's navy career. Grace Hopper reflects both the merits and shortcomings of Improbable Warriors.

Once again, Williams has done her homework. The book's considerable research is thoroughly documented by abundant footnotes, an extensive bibliography, and an impressive array of primary sources. But neither biography nor history ends with the facts assembled, and here Williams again falls short. Her seven chapters, each about twenty-five pages long, read more like a succession of transcriptions from her note cards than a compelling narrative. The narrow focus fails to situate Hopper comfortably in the larger picture of computer development, to say nothing of the United States during the last half of the twentieth century. Even a careful reader may have trouble sorting through the flotsam and...