Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII

From PBS – In 1942 a secret U.S. military program was launched to recruit women to the war effort. But unlike the efforts to recruit Rosie the Riveter to the factory, this clandestine search targeted female mathematicians who would become human ‘computers’ for the U.S. Army. From the bombing of Axis Europe to the assaults on Japanese strongholds, women worked around-the-clock six days a week, creating ballistics tables that proved crucial to Allied success. Rosie made the weapons, but the female computers made them accurate. When the first electronic computer (ENIAC) was developed to aid the Army’s calculation efforts, six of these women were tapped to become its first programmers. Top Secret Rosies is the as-yet-untold story of women and technology that helped win a war and usher in the modern computer age. This is the chronicle of four very different women who worked as human computers at the University of Pennsylvania from 1942-1946. Capturing the opportunities and exhilaration of the times and exploring the moral dilemmas inherent in their work, Top Secret Rosies follows their efforts as they labored night and day to create the mathematical computations that made every Allied bomb and bullet more deadly.

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