Early computing 2

So, before the 20th century, most people experienced computing through pre-computed

tables assembled

by those amazing “human computers” we talked about.

So if you needed to know the square root of 8 million 6 hundred and 75 thousand 3 hundred

and 9, instead of spending all day hand-cranking your step reckoner, you could look it up in

a huge book full of square root tables in a minute or so.

Speed and accuracy are particularly important on the battlefield, and so militaries were

among the first to apply computing to complex problems.

A particularly difficult problem is accurately firing artillery shells, which by the 1800s

could travel well over a kilometre (or a bit more than half a mile).

Add to this varying wind conditions, temperature, and atmospheric pressure, and even hitting

something as large as a ship was difficult.

Range Tables were created that allowed gunners to look up environmental conditions and

the

ance they wanted to fire, and the table would tell them the angle to set the canon.

These Range Tables worked so well, that they were used well into World War Two.

The problem was if you changed the design of the cannon or the shell, a whole new

the table had to be computed, which was massively time-consuming and inevitably led to errors.

Charles Babbage acknowledged this problem in 1822 in a paper to the Royal Astronomical

Society entitled: “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical

and mathematical tables

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