- Kathleen Antonelli
Kathleen "Kay" McNulty Mauchly Antonelli (
February 12 1921 –April 20 2006 ) was one of the six original programmers of theENIAC , the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.Early life and education
She was born Kathleen Rita McNulty in the Creeslough
Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking region) ofCounty Donegal ,Ireland in 1921 during theIrish War of Independence . On the night of her birth, her father, James, who was anIrish Republican Army training officer, was arrested and imprisoned inDerry Gaol for 2 years. On his release, the family emigrated to theUnited States in October 1924 and settled inPennsylvania where James McNulty established a successfulstone masonry business. At the time, Kathleen was unable to speak any English, only Gaelic; she would remember prayers in Gaelic for the rest of her life.After attending
parochial grade school in Chestnut Hill and Hallahan Catholic Girls High School in Philadelphia, she graduated with a degree in mathematics fromChestnut Hill College for Women in June 1942 (theattack on Pearl Harbor had shaken her senior year). Out of a class of 92 women, Kathleen was one of 3 math majors to graduate that year, and all of them had taken every mathematics course offered: two semesters of algebra, the history of math, integral calculus, spherical trigonometry, differential calculus, projective geometry, partial differential equations, and statistics. (In high school she had taken a year of algebra, a year of plane geometry, a second year of algebra, and a year of trigonometry and solid geometry.)During her third year of college, Kathleen began the job hunt, knowing that she wanted to work in mathematics but didn't want to be a
schoolteacher . She learned thatinsurance companies'actuarial positions required amaster's degree and were seldom filled by women anyway. Feeling that business training would make her more employable, she took as many business courses as her college schedule would permit:accounting , money andbanking ,business law ,economics , andstatistics .Career as a computer
But a week or two after graduating, she happened to see a
U.S. Civil Service ad in "The Philadelphia Inquirer ". Under the headline "Wanted: Women With Degrees in Mathematics," it read, "The need for women engineers and scientists is growing both in industry and government... Women are being offered scientific and engineering jobs where formerly men were preferred. Now is the time to consider your job in science and engineering... you will find that the slogan there as elsewhere is 'WOMEN WANTED!'." The Army was looking for women with mathematics degrees--right there inPhiladelphia . She immediately called her two co-math majors, Frances Bilas and Josephine Benson. The latter couldn't meet up with them, so Kathleen and Fran met in Philadelphia one morning in June 1946 for an interview in a building on South Broad Street (likely the Union League Building), where they were informed of positions available throughAberdeen Proving Grounds at theUniversity of Pennsylvania . Shortly thereafter, the two both received letters telling them to report for a week at theMoore School of Electrical Engineering ,University of Pennsylvania , 33rd and Walnut Streets, beginning a day in early July 1942. At a starting annual salary of $1,620, pay for the position computingballistics trajectories used forartillery firing tables (mostly using mechanicaldesk calculators and extremely large sheets of columned paper) was low (S.P. 4, a "sub-professional" pay grade), but both Kathleen and Fran were satisfied to have attained employment that utilized their educations, during wartime, having had no prior employment experience, and that served thewar effort . Her officialcivil service title, as printed on her employment documentation, was "computer." With about 10 other "girls" (as the female computers were called) and 4 men--a group recently brought to the Moore School fromAberdeen Proving Grounds inMaryland --Kay and Fran would conduct their work in a large, empty classroom on the first floor of the Moore School; the same room would later be the one where theENIAC was built and operated until December 1946.Despite all their coursework, their mathematics training had not prepared Kay (as she came to be called early on at the Moore School) and Fran for their work calculating trajectories for firing tables: they were both unfamiliar with numerical integration methods used to compute the trajectories, and the textbook lent to them to study from ("Numerical Mathematical Analysis", 1st Edition by James B. Scarborough, Oxford University Press, 1930) provided little enlightenment. The two newcomers ultimately learned how to perform the steps of their calculations, accurate to ten decimal places, through practice and the advisement of a well-liked supervisor, Lila Todd. A total of about 75 young female computers were employed at the Moore School in this period, many of them taking courses from
Adele Goldstine ,Mary Mauchly , andMildred Kramer . The work was tedious, and many of them dropped out due to workload, but Kay became prominent among the computing women.After 2 or 3 months, Kay and Fran were moved to work on the
differential analyzer in the basement of the Moore School, the largest and most sophisticated analog mechanical calculator of the time, of which there were only 3 in the United States and 5 or 6 in the world (all of the others were in Great Britain). Using the analyzer (invented byVannevar Bush ofMIT a decade prior and made more precise with improvements by the Moore School staff), a single trajectory computation--about 40 hours of work on a mechanical desk calculator--could be performed in about 50 minutes.Career as an ENIAC programmer
The
ENIAC was developed for the purpose of performing these same calculations between 1943-1946. In June 1945, Kay was selected to be one of its first programmers, along with several other women from the computer corps: Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman, and a fifth computer named Helen Greenman (nicknamed "Greenie.") [ [http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/mags/an/&toc=comp/mags/an/1996/03/a3toc.xml&DOI=10.1109/85.511940] IEEE Annals of the History of Computing: The Women of ENIAC] ] When Greenie declined to go to Aberdeen for training because she had a nice apartment inWest Philadelphia and a 1st alternate refused to cut short a vacation inMissouri , Betty Jean Jennings, the 2nd alternate, got the job, and between June and August of 1945 they received training atAberdeen Proving Grounds in theIBM punch card equipment that was to be used as the I/O for theENIAC . (Later, Kay's college schoolmate and fellow computer Fran Bilas would join the team ofENIAC programmers at the Moore School, though she did not attend the initial training at Aberdeen.) The computer could complete the same ballistics calculations described above in about 10 seconds, but it would often take one or two days to set the computer up for a new set of problems, via plugs and switches. It was the women's responsibility to determine the sequence of steps required to complete the calculations for each problem and set up theENIAC according; early on, they consulted withENIAC engineers such asArthur Burks to determine how theENIAC could be programmed.Because the
ENIAC was a classified project, the programmers were not at first allowed into the room to see the machine, but they were given access to blueprints from which to work out programs in an adjacent room. Programming theENIAC involved discretizing the differential equations involved in a trajectory problem to the precision allowed by theENIAC and calculating the route to the appropriate bank of electronics in parallel progression, with each instruction having to reach the correct location in time to within 1/5,000th of a second. Having devised a program on paper, the women were allowed into theENIAC room to physically program the machine.Much of the programming time of the
ENIAC consisted of setting up and running test programs that assured its operators of the whole system's integrity--every vacuum tube, every electrical connection needed to be verified before running a problem.Kay transferred to
Aberdeen Proving Ground 'sBallistics Research Laboratory along with theENIAC when it was moved there in mid-1947; she was joined by Ruth Lichterman and Fran Bilas, but the other three women began families or started other jobs, preferring to stay in Philadelphia rather than relocate to the remote Aberdeen and live an Army base life.Family life
ENIAC co-inventorJohn Mauchly , who had since departed his post as a professor at the Moore School to found his own computer company along withPresper Eckert , made frequent trips toWashington, D.C. during this period, and stopped in to check up on theENIAC in Aberdeen. Mauchly had already hired Betty Jean Jennings (who had married and now went byJean Bartik ) and Betty Snyder (now calledBetty Holberton ) and had hoped to attract Kay to his fledgling company as well. But Mauchly's wife had died in a September 1946 drowning accident, and as a recent widower with two children, Mauchly instead proposed to Kay, who was almost 14 years his junior.Resigning her post at Aberdeen, and without the blessing of her Irish Catholic parents, she married him in 1948. They lived initially in his row house on St. Mark's Street near the
University of Pennsylvania , and later in a large farmhouse called Little Linden inAmbler, Pennsylvania . With Mauchly, Kay had five children.She later worked on the software design for later computers including the
BINAC andUNIVAC I computers whose hardware was designed by her husband.Later life
John Mauchly died in 1980 following several bouts of illness and recoveries, and she married photographer
Severo Antonelli in 1985. After a long struggle withParkinson's disease , her second husband died in 1996; Kay had suffered a heart attack while caring for him, but made a full recovery.Following Mauchly's death, Kay carried on the legacy of the ENIAC pioneers by authoring articles, giving talks (frequently along with
Jean Bartik , with whom she remained lifelong friends), and making herself available for interviews with reporters and researchers. She was inducted into theWomen in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997 along with the other original ENIAC programmers, and she accepted the induction ofJohn Mauchly into theNational Inventors Hall of Fame inAkron, Ohio in 2002.Kay was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in early 2006, and died in April at the age of 85.
Trivia
* While her official date of birth is always listed as February 12th, Kay herself suspected she may have been born on February 13, the date having been "fudged" by her family according to a common practice out of Irish triskaidekaphobic
superstition .
* Kay's first husbandJohn Mauchly suffered fromhereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia , or HHT, agenetic disorder that leads to vascular malformations. Because HHT isautosomal dominant , children of a single carrier have a 50% chance of inheriting the disease. While neither of Mauchly's two children from his previous marriage appear to have inherited HTT, most of Kay's children with him have been diagnosed with HHT.References
External links
* [http://www.witi.com/center/witimuseum/halloffame/1997/eniac.php WITI Hall of Fame]
* [http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Antonelli.html Biography from the University of St Andrews, Scotland]
* [http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/display.phtml?id=22 Oral history interview with Frances E. Holberton] - Holberton was, with Antonelli, one of the six original ENIAC programmers.Charles Babbage Institute , University of Minnesota.
* [http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/states/pennsylvania/counties/philadelphia_county/philadelphia/14420129.htm Philadelphia Inquirer: death notice]
* [http://www.dun-na-ngall.com/nw69.html Death of Donegal's Computing Pioneer]
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