Part 27

What NANWEP does is to take the meteorological data from some 3,000 reporting stations, compare them with those existing yesterday, and print out a weather map for the Northern Hemisphere for tomorrow. Because there are so many more stations reporting than the handful that Richardson used, the number of computations has risen to the astronomical total of about 300,000,000. Despite this, a Control Data Corporation 1604 digital computer does the job in a good bit less time than the three months it took Richardson. NANWEP prints out its weather maps 40 minutes from the time all data are in.

Teletype reports come in from the thousands of weather stations; these are punched on tape and fed to the 1604. Since the information includes geographical position in addition to meteorological data, the computer prints out numbers that form a map of weather coming up. Although the meteorologist adds some clarifying lines by connecting points of equal pressure, the “raw” map with its distinctive shaded areas is meaningful even to the layman.

Further refinements are in the offing. As many as 10,000 weather stations may eventually report to the central computer, which may also learn to accept the teletype information directly with no need for the intermediate step of punching a tape. Although it will be a long time before a positive forecast, exact in every detail, is possible, NANWEP already has lifted weather prediction from the educated guesswork of the older meteorologists to truly scientific forecasting.

It turns out that numerical weather prediction brings with it some bonuses. NANWEP can predict the action of ocean waves three days in advance, in addition to its regular wind, temperature, and precipitation information. So it is now being put to work preparing optimum routes for ships. Here’s the way it would work. A ship sailing from California to Japan requests the best routes for the voyage. Initially the computer is given the ship’s characteristics and told how it will perform in various sea conditions. It then integrates this information with the predicted sea conditions for the first day’s leg, and plots several different courses. Distances the ship would travel on each of these courses are plotted, and a curve is drawn to connect them. Now the computer repeats the process for the next day, so that each of the tentative courses branches out with its own alternates. The process is repeated for each of the five days of the voyage. Then the computer works backward, picking the best route for the entire voyage, and gives the course to be followed for optimum time. If that isn’t sufficiently informative for the captain, he can request and receive not one but three courses: one for the fastest trip regardless of sea condition, another for the fastest trip with waves of only a certain height, and finally a course for the fastest trip through calm water! The advantages of such a service are immediately obvious and give a hint at many other applications of the technique to air travel, truck transport, and so on.

NANWEP is ground-based, of course. There are also airborne weather computers like those of the U.S. Weather Bureau’s National Severe Storm Research Aircraft Project. The Weather Bureau has jumped its computer budget from $1.5 to $2.5 million to extend this and other projects. The compact airborne computers ride along in DC-6 and B-57 aircraft to monitor hurricanes off Florida and tornadoes in the Great Plains area. The computers gather forty different kinds of information and convert it to digital form at thousands of characters a second. Such monitoring of violent weather by means of computers suggests an intriguing use of the machine. Man has long considered the prospect of going the step beyond weather recording and prediction to actually changing or even creating his own weather. He has done a few rather startling things of this kind, admittedly on a small scale but with tremendous implications. Cloud-seeding experiments are samples, as attempts both to induce precipitation and to create or destroy storms. These experiments, though inconclusive, have led to results—including precipitation of lawsuits and ill feeling. Meteorologists attempted to divert a hurricane along the Atlantic coast line once, apparently with results. But the storm swerved too far and the weathermen incurred the justifiable wrath of those living in the area affected. Why not simulate such an experiment in the computer? Besides being safer, it is also far cheaper. In the long run, we may do something about the weather at that.

Computers in Space

There are many points in history when seemingly fortuitous happenings take place. The invention of the printing press appears to have occurred at a fork in the road as literature flowered. The discovery of gasoline and the automobile went hand in hand. So it is with the electronic computer and the spacecraft. Is the computer here because it was needed for such an application, or did it actually cause the advent of space flight? Our conclusions must depend on our belief or disbelief in such things as causality. A realistic view might be merely to applaud and appreciate the confluence of two important streams of thought to make a river that will one day flow to the other planets and finally out of the solar system entirely.

Putting even something so unsophisticated as a brick into orbit would require the plotting of an exact trajectory handily done only by a computer. Sending the Mercury capsule aloft obviously requires a more refined aiming system, and its re-entry into the atmosphere demands a nicety of calculation measured in a fraction of a degree. The same is true for the Russian achievements in sending a space vehicle around the moon, and manned capsules in prolonged orbit. Such navigation can be planned and carried out only by the sophisticated mathematics of a computer. Dr. Wernher von Braun has said that any effective space-vehicle firing program would be impossible without computers and computing techniques.

Not long ago, the mariner could leisurely brace himself on the deck of his vessel and take a noon sight with his sextant. It mattered little if it took him some time to work out the computations; his ship traveled at only a few knots and in only two dimensions. Today the space capsule or missile moves as far in a single minute as a ship might in an entire day, and it moves not across the practically flat surface of the sea but through three-dimensional space in which that third degree of freedom is of vital importance. Not only must the navigation be done with fantastic precision, it must be done in “real time” to be of any value. This is true whether the mathematics is being done by a Mercury capsule or one of our antimissile missiles. Just as Richardson’s weather prediction three months after the fact was of little use, the trajectory of an invading missile will avail us nothing if it takes us thirty minutes to compute. The problem by then, for the survivors, will be one of fallout and not blast.

For this reason a computer is aboard practically every space vehicle that leaves the earth. The Atlas and Titan, the Minuteman and Polaris, all are controlled by tiny digital computers in their innards, supplemented by more complex machines on the ground. These ground computers calculate the trajectory, then monitor the missile to correct its course if necessary. Complex as these functions seem, they are childishly simple by comparison with the kind of calculations that are necessary for lunar or planetary flight.

A mathematician who knew his astronomy could work out the figures necessary to launch a space craft on its flight to Venus, but he would have to start some time before launching day. In fact, it would take forty generations of mathematicians to do the job. The trip itself would consume about four months. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology, this 800-year project is planned and flown in thirty seconds by an IBM 7090 computer. For example, the computer tells us that if we had blasted off bright and early on August 17, 1962, we could make it to the Clouded Planet at 10:09 A.M., December 9. The curved trip through space would cover 32,687,000 miles.

The computer, then, not only can perform in real time but can even shrink time. The Venus trip is simulated daily at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and tapes stored in the computer cabinets also bear the names Moon, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and so on. When the day comes to make the actual voyage, the odds are good that because of what scientists have learned from the computer the trip will go as smoothly as all the simulations. Rather than the planetary voyages, which are still some time off, lunar soft landings will be among the first to demonstrate the accuracy of simulations now being made by General Dynamics, whose Atlas-Centaur will put the lunar rover Surveyor on the moon shortly. Apollo, the three-man lunar spaceship, won’t be far behind.

Not long ago a computer was put to work to see if it could pare down the costs of the Atlas and Thor rocket engines. We have to have such defensive weapons, but the cheaper we can make them the more we can afford. The economy program worked, reducing costs more than a third.

Summary

The computer is on the Washington payroll to stay, and it may well move up the hierarchical ladder there. It was not a comedian but an M.I.T. professor who recently suggested that the computer will replace the bureaucrat. Contending that the computer is inherently more flexible than the bureaucrat, Professor John McCarthy told an Institute of Radio Engineers meeting that the machines will not regiment us. “On the contrary, I think we can expect a great deal more politeness from machines than we have gotten from humans,” he said. His views were debated by other panelists, but the gauntlet seems to have been flung. With a party affiliation, the computer may well run for president someday!

Lichty, © Field Enterprises, Inc.

“It IS human, men!... Besides solving our problems of global strategy, it’s also beginning to jot down its memoirs!” ]

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“Business may not be the noblest pursuit, but it is true that men are bringing to it some of the qualities which actuate the explorer, scientist, artist: the zest, the open-mindedness, even the disinterestedness, with which the scientific investigator explores some field of research.”

—Earnest Elmo Calkins

8: The Computer in Business and Industry

The government, of course, is not the only user of the electronic computer. Business is faced with the same problems as government, plus others perhaps, and can use the same techniques in planning, producing, merchandising, and keeping track of its products. To General Electric goes the distinction of first installing the large-scale electronic computer for its business-data processing. This was done quite recently, in 1954. Commenting on the milestone, the Harvard Business Review said in part:

The revolution starts this summer at General Electric Company’s new Appliance Park near Louisville, Kentucky. The management planning behind the acquisition of the first UNIVAC to be used in business may eventually be recorded by historians as the foundation of the second industrial revolution; just as Jacquard’s automatic loom in 1801 or Frederick W. Taylor’s studies of the principles of scientific management a hundred years later marked turning points in business history.

It is early yet for comment from historians, but the growth of the business computers from the pioneer UNIVAC bears out the theme of the Harvard Business Review suggestion. In 1961 there were 6,000 large electronic computers in use; General Electric alone has more than 100. One big reason for this is the fact that government is not alone in its output of paperwork. It has been estimated that one-sixth of our Gross National Product, or about $85 billion, is devoted to paper-handling. In the time it takes to read this chapter, for example, Americans are writing 4 million checks, and this is only a small part of the paperwork involved in the banking business.

General Electric Co., Computer Dept.

First National Bank of Arizona personnel operate sorters during initial operation of a new GE-210 computer-controlled data-processing system. The sorters process bank checks at the rate of 750 per minute as printer (foreground) prints bank statements at 900 lines per minute. ]

Wholesale banks have been called fiscal intelligence agencies, doing business by the truckload, and measuring the morning mail by the ton. Yet this information is dealt with not only in volume, but in precise and accurate detail. If a client asks about the rating of a customer who has just ordered several million dollars worth of goods, the bank may be called on to furnish this information in a very short time, even though the customer resides halfway around the world.

Since they deal in figures, it is logical that banks were among the first businesses to be computerized. Many of us are aware of those stylized numbers now on the bottom of most of our checks, and vaguely conscious that through some mysterious juggling by computers called ERMA and other such names banks balance our accounts at electronic speed.