Marlyn Wescoff
Marlyn Wescoff — born Marlyn Wescoff (1922 – 4 December 2008), later Meltzer — was an American mathematician and one of the six original programmers of ENIAC.
Life
Wescoff graduated from Temple University in 1942 with a mathematics degree and, like the others, went to work computing for the Army — weather calculations under John Mauchly's group at first, then artillery firing tables — in Philadelphia. She volunteered for the secret machine project that turned out to be ENIAC, working on its left-side digit trays and the program that would become its public demonstration.
ENIAC and after
Wescoff's specialty was the machine's trickiest physical domain: the panels that had to be cabled just so for a trajectory to run. She married Philip Meltzer in February 1947 and left the project before ENIAC's relocation to the Aberdeen Proving Ground — at a time when marriage generally ended a woman's technical career by custom if not by rule.
Her second career was uncommonly dramatic: decades later, in her seventies, she entered rabbinical school and was ordained a Reform rabbi in her late seventies (c. 2001) — among the oldest people ever ordained. She died in 2008.
Legacy
- Inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame (1997) with the other five ENIAC programmers.
- Her life reads as two complete stories — founding programmer, then rabbi — joined by the fact that almost no one knew about the first until her last decade.
See also
References
- Kleiman, Kathy. Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World's First Modern Computer (Grand Central, 2022).
- Haigh, Thomas, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope. ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer (MIT Press, 2016).
- Evans, Claire L. Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Portfolio, 2018).
- Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, 180 U.S.P.Q. 673 (D. Minn. 1973) — the ENIAC patent trial.