Unsung Inventors

World War II was a war of technology. The relationships between government, private industry, and academia forged to gain a national edge on the Axis gave us the military-industrial complex and bankrolled a generation of technological innovators in the process. It’s unlikely computing would have developed as a field or an industry as quickly as it did without the complex calculations demanded by the war machine. The war made risks worth taking and accelerated everything. It also let women into the process. Men may have dropped bombs, but it was women who told them where to do it.

It’s unsettling to think of any war, especially such an ugly one, as an opportunity. But working on military calculations during World War II allowed Betty Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Grace Hopper, and their peers to do more with their lives than teach, marry, or be secretaries. It opened an entirely new technical field to women, one whose importance would become evident only after they showed what remarkable things could be done at the confluence of people and computing machines. But change is never so simple. As easily as war gave these women a ticket out of potentially desultory marriages and dead-end secretarial careers, peace threatened to take it all away.

After the war, as military funding dried up and authority over computational projects transitioned back to civilian hands, Grace Hopper found herself at a crossroads. In a short time, she’d become an expert in a nascent field, but she’d made sacrifices. Although she and Vincent had been separated since the beginning of the war, they only divorced in 1945. He promptly remarried—to a friend of Grace’s, who had been a bridesmaid at their wedding. It can’t have been easy. She was forty-three, and after what she’d been through, she couldn’t dream of going back to teaching calculus to undergraduates and being the comfortable small-town college professor once again. But as soldiers coming home from the front reclaimed their place in American life, many women around Grace were returning to their prewar roles. Even a few of the ENIAC Six went domestic. Being someone who’d left everything behind to stake a career at the doubly male-dominated intersection of military and academic life, Grace was nervous.

This is an extract from Claire L Evans' Broad Band published by Portfolio