Over the past year or two I’ve been collecting examples of extraordinary women
whose technical achievements have made the modern world possible. The
contributions made by some of them have become more well known in recent years,
while others remain relatively (and unjustifiably) obscure.
Rather than simply keeping the list to myself, I thought I’d publish it. And so,
in chronological order by date of birth…
Perhaps the most well-known name on this list, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was a
mathematician and probably the first computer programmer. She was fascinated by
the proposed (and still unbuilt) Analytical
Engine, and translated and
expanded upon an Italian-language article describing the Engine. In her expanded
notes, she included an algorithm for computing Bernoulli
numbers with the Analytical
Engine: the first ever computer program.
Katharine Burr Blodgett was a researcher on the borders between chemistry and
physics, who worked for most of her life at General Electric. She was the first
woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in Physics from Cambridge University. Among many
other discoveries, she devised a reliable way to deposit single-molecule-thick
coating layers on glass. This led directly to the development of nonreflective
coatings (AKA “invisible
glass”), which have been
used in cinema and photography ever since.
Another mathematician, Grace Hopper studied at Yale and went on to teach at
Vassar, becoming an associate professor by the age of 35. In WWII she enlisted
with the US Navy, where she became one of the first programmers of the Harvard
Mark I. After the war, she worked
on the UNIVAC, and was instrumental in
developing the compiler – a tool that could convert code written by humans into
code suitable for a machine – starting with a language and link-loader tool
called A-0.
Developments on the “A” series of languages and compilers led directly to the
invention of COBOL.
Already a successful Hollywood actor by 1940, Lamarr is another woman on the
list who turned her attention to solving problems for the war effort. She turned
her self-taught intellect on a number of different problems, but her lasting
impact on the modern world is through her invention of Frequency-hopping spread
spectrum
techniques, initially designed to prevent tracking or jamming of torpedo radios,
but now a core technology in mobile phone networks (as
CDMA), Wi-Fi, and
Bluetooth.
Betty Holberton, like many women in the early history of computers, was one
herself. She was hired by the Moore School of Engineering as a “computor” and
shortly afterwards became one of the six original programmers of the
ENIAC, one of the many machines that
claims to be the first general-purpose programmable computer. After the war,
like Grace Hopper, she ended up working on the UNIVAC where she helped write the
first program that generated a computer program (known as
SORT/MERGE), as well as
the first computer statistical analysis tools, which were used in the 1950 US
Census.
Once upon a time, busy telephone exchanges were extremely noisy places. Incoming
calls were routed to their destination by stepping
switches, electromechanical
devices which rotated a set of electrical contacts mounted on a “wiper” in order
to interconnect the correct circuits. Today, telephony switching is purely
electrical: switching machines are orders of magnitude smaller, and can switch
orders of magnitude more circuits using orders of magnitude less energy. None of
this would be possible without Erna Schneider Hoover’s invention of Stored
Program Control in the
early 1950s. Schneider Hoover received one of the first software
patents for her work.
I hope that Margaret Hamilton requires no introduction. The photograph of her
standing next to the code listings for the Apollo Guidance
Computer
has become a well-known reminder of her place in technology history. During the
space race in the 1960s, she was Director of the Software Engineering Division
at the Draper
Lab and had
overall responsibility for the development of the software that took Apollo to
the moon and back. In fact, it seems likely that the term “software engineering”
itself was coined by Hamilton:
During [the time of the Apollo space missions] at MIT, she wanted to give
their software “legitimacy”, just like with other engineering disciplines, so
that it (and those building it) would be given its due respect; and, as a
result she made up the term “software engineering” to distinguish it from
other kinds of engineering. [source]
In 2016, Hamilton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US’s
highest civilian honour.
In 1968, Barbara Liskov was awarded her Ph.D. – on artificial intelligence
approaches to chess endgames – making her one of the first women in the US to
earn a doctoral degree in computer science. In the nearly fifty years since, she
has become recognised as one of the world’s foremost researchers in the field of
programming languages and distributed systems: she received the von Neumann
medal in 2004, and the Turing award in 2008.
Among her many contributions to these fields, she is most well-known for the
Liskov substitution
principle, the “L”
in the SOLID
mnemonic for object-oriented design principles. The substitution principle lays
out an intuitive meaning of “subtyping” in a programming system: that objects in
a program should be replaceable with instances of their subtypes without
altering the correctness of the program.
The Spanning Tree
Protocol is one of the
many technologies that make the internet possible. Without it, we would either
a) not have any large computer networks, or b) all large networks would be
impossibly fragile: no redundant network links could be added, because they
would introduce loops around which traffic would travel forever.
Instead, Radia Perlman’s STP and its descendant algorithms are used to build a
loop-free topology for Ethernet networks on top of a physical topology which may
include redundant links. Like several other members of the list, Perlman is a
graduate of MIT, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1988. She is the author of one of
the seminal textbooks on network routing and
bridges.
The typography and iconography of the original Macintosh were in no small part
the work of Susan Kare, who joined Apple in 1982. If you’ve used Macs for any
length of time, you’ll remember the “Happy Mac”
icon,
and possibly the original trashcan
icon or the
Dogcow. But it seems likely that the
contribution of Kare’s that made it into the most hands was the Chicago
typeface which was used by
the original iPod in 2001 and continued to be at the heart of the iPod’s user
interface until the iPod Photo was released in 2004.
Of all the women on this list, Wilson is certainly one of the most egregiously
underrecognised. It is overwhelmingly likely that you are holding her work in
your hands as you read these words, as nearly every smartphone contains one or
more processors based on the ARM instruction
set, which she designed in
1983. By 2012, this instruction set and processors based on it were part of
more than 95% of all smartphone devices.
Before developing the ARM architecture, Wilson was part of the small team that
designed the computer that became the BBC
Micro, a device used by generations of
schoolchildren in the UK, and which gave many of them (including me!) their
first experience of computer
programming.
If I know one thing about this list, it’s that it is incomplete. For
generations, women’s contributions to science and technology have been ignored,
forgotten, or actively
stolen
from them by
men. If you know of women who should be on this list, please email me (I’m
nick at this domain) so I can learn about them and add them to it.