The History of TerrorismPreview

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World War II field artillery
155 mm Gun M1 (Long Tom)
The 155-millimeter 'Long Tom' field cannon, one of the most popular big guns used during World War II, incorporates five hundred variables in its firing table."
"Air temperature, gunpowder temperature, elevation, humidity, wind speed, and direction, and even soil type-all are important environmental factors required in the complex calculations."
"Not surprisingly, these charts were treacherous to calculate. All the variables in hundreds of permutations had to be plugged in and worked out by hand."
"And there were surprises: the army discovered that tables calculated to work in Europe didn't work in Africa because the soil variables were different, though the guns were delivered, they were little more than dead weight until the firing data could...
...be recalculated from scratch."
"Squads of clerks-usually women-worked around the clock using pen, paper, and mechanical adding aids to crunch the numbers."

"These women were called 'computers' before digital computers existed, and they were incredibly important to the war effort."

Page 39 of Surveillance Valley

Parents

"Squads of clerks-usually women-worked around the clock using pen, paper, and mechanical adding aids to crunch the numbers."
Women's rights

Children

"Firing tables were of such vital significance that both the navy and the army funded separate efforts to build automated calculators-all in the service of aiming giant killing machines-and help develop the first digital computers in the process."

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