1613

First Recorded Use of the Word Computer

Richard Brathwaite (1588–1673)

English poet Richard Brathwaite didn’t know it, but he was on to something big. When he wrote The Yong Mans Gleanings in 1613, Braithwaite became the first person to use the word computer in print—at least, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It turns out that the idea of computing was already in common usage: computer is a combination of the Latin words putare, which means “to think or trim,” and com, which means “together.” Oxford dates the first nonprint use of that word to 1579, linking it with “arithmetical or mathematical reckoning.” And it’s certainly something that was done by people, as Sir Thomas Browne made clear in volume VI of Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), and Jonathan Swift did in A Tale of a Tub (1704). To these authors, computers were human, and that would remain the dominant usage of the word until the 1940s.

It’s not surprising that the idea of human computing emerged along with the period of Enlightenment. Computing, an extension of mathematics, was inherently accessible and democratic. Computation required nothing more than clarity of thought: anyone who could master the rules of math could distinguish truth from falsehood. This was different from mastery of subjects such as history, religion, and philosophy, which depended upon reading and memorization, or mastery of chemistry and physics, which depended upon performing experiments. But computation held the promise of being one true way to make sense of the world. Gottfried Leibniz, the German mathematician and philosopher, believed that one day it would be possible—and desirable—to reduce all knowledge and philosophy to a series of computable, mathematical equations. As he wrote in The Art of Discovery in 1685, “If controversies were to arise, there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two calculators. For it would suffice for them to take their pencils in their hands and to sit down at the abacus, and say to each other . . . Let us calculate.”

For centuries, a “computer” was a person who crunched numbers. At NASA, women were responsible for computing launch windows, trajectories, fuel consumption, and other pivotal tasks for the US space program.