COMPUTER SCIENTIST AND NAVY ADMIRAL UNITED STATESA ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things.
—GRACE HOPPER
“How does it work?” wondered seven-year-old Grace. “How does it ring?” She held her alarm clock in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. Carefully, she unscrewed the back, but as she pulled it off, levers, springs, wheels, and gears exploded all over the floor. She hadn’t had enough time to see how they fit together.
“What now?” she wondered. She decided that the only solution was to try again.
Grace went to her mother’s room and found another alarm clock, which she took apart. Then she got her brother’s clock and took that one apart as well. In the end, Grace went through every room in the house and collected four more alarm clocks—seven in all. And she proceeded to take each one apart.
When her mother walked into the living room, there were pieces of metal strewn about everywhere.
“What are you doing?!” her mother cried.
“Figuring out how it works,” explained Grace.
Her mother laughed. “Get this mess cleaned up, please.”
Grace’s face fell. She still hadn’t figured out how the alarm clock rang.
“And you may keep one clock to put back together.”
Grace smiled. One clock would be enough. She would figure it out.
Grace spent the rest of her life figuring things out.
She was born in New York City in 1906. During her childhood, women couldn’t vote and were expected to stay home and have children, not a career. But Grace’s parents encouraged all their children (even their daughters) to be curious, to read, and to explore their interests. Her parents also believed their daughters should go to college—very unusual at that time.
Grace’s great-grandfather, an admiral in the US Navy during the Civil War, was a role model for her. As a girl, she sailed a small boat in a lake while her mother watched from shore. When a strong wind knocked the boat over, Grace’s mother yelled through her megaphone, “Remember your great-grandfather, the admiral.”2 Grace couldn’t abandon ship, so she swam it back to shore.
Grace was smart in school. At age seventeen, she was accepted to Vassar, a women’s college. Vassar offered classes they thought were appropriate for young ladies, like “Husband and Wife” and “Motherhood.”1 Grace skipped those classes and studied math and physics instead.
She graduated from Vassar at the top of her class with a degree in math. Then she went on to Yale for her master’s and PhD. She was the first woman in Yale’s history to earn a doctorate in math. After graduating, she got a job teaching at Vassar. She was an excellent teacher, always challenging her students to look at things differently. She warned them that the most dangerous thing they could say was “We’ve always done it this way.”3 Instead, she urged them to innovate.
Grace’s life took a turn when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. Grace thought again of her great-grandfather, the Civil War admiral, and decided to enlist. She planned to sign up for the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services (WAVES), but she was too old and sixteen pounds under the weight requirement.4 She applied anyway. The navy gave her a waiver for her weight, and she was in.
As with school, Grace excelled in the military. She was the top graduate from training and quickly advanced to lieutenant. Because of her math knowledge, the navy sent her to Harvard University to work on America’s first-ever computer, the Mark I. It was enormous: fifty-one feet long, eight feet tall, and five tons in weight!5 For a math whiz who loved to tinker, the Mark I was a dream come true.
Computers in the 1940s were much bigger and less powerful than computers today. A typical computer might fill an entire room!
On her first day, Grace’s boss gave her a codebook and told her she had one week to figure out how to “program the beast” and get it running.6 She met the challenge and became the Mark I’s lead programmer. She spent the next five years programming it to work on math problems related to radar, mines, and atomic bombs. She also wrote a 561-page manual for the Mark I that historians consider groundbreaking. It is one of the earliest examples of digital computer programs.
Back in the 1940s, computers were brand-new, and people couldn’t envision all that they would be able to do someday. Universities and the military had them, but that’s it. Grace, however, believed computers had the potential to do more than just figure out math problems—way more. When the war was over, her colleagues moved back to regular jobs. Grace was the only one to stay behind to continue.
In 1949, Grace accepted a job as the senior mathematician for Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation developing a new computer called the UNIVAC. The UNIVAC had new technology that made it much faster than other computers, and the company hoped to make computers that could be used by businesses everywhere. Grace knew that for this to happen, computers would have to be easier to use.
At that time, the only way to talk to computers was in binary language. Programmers had to type in long strings of 0s and 1s to tell the computer what to do. Computers didn’t understand human language made of letters, so Grace invented a program called a “compiler,” which could take simple human commands and translate them into binary code.
Grace loved collecting: books, stamps, china, dolls, and computer souvenirs. She was also a clotheshorse with seven walk-in closets full of outfits, jewelry, shoes, and gloves. She wouldn’t wear the same dress twice in a year. And Grace owned three apartments: one she lived in and two others to hold all her stuff!8
Grace’s compiler enabled computers to understand letters and words, making it much easier for humans to communicate with them. Her team invented the FLOW-MATIC program for UNIVAC, which could do things like calculate bills and payments for companies. That led to the creation of a whole new programming language called COBOL (common business-oriented language) in 1959—a language still used by businesses and government organizations today.
Grace retired from the navy in 1966, but it didn’t last long. A year later, the navy asked her to come back; over the next twenty years, Grace rose to the rank of admiral. During these “post-retirement” years, she helped set up common standards for the navy’s programming languages—standards that were adopted by the Department of Defense and eventually made it into all future computers.
When Grace finally retired for real in 1986, she was eighty years old, the oldest active-duty officer in America.7 The US Congress had granted her special permission to stay in the navy beyond normal retirement age. Even after retiring, Grace continued to work as a consultant for a computer company and lectured at colleges and universities.
Nicknamed the “Grand Lady of Software,”9 Grace earned many honors in her lifetime. She was the first woman chosen as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society and was awarded America’s National Medal of Technology by President George Bush.10 In Arlington, Virginia, you can stroll through Grace Murray Hopper Park or take a ride on the USS Hopper, a ship the sailors call Amazing Grace.11 When Grace died in 1992, she was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
One day Grace was repairing a computer that had shorted out because of a dead moth inside it. Grace removed the moth and joked that she had “debugged” it. A new computer term was born!12
At a time when there were almost no women working in computer science, Grace made a huge impact on early computing and the development of computers. And her influence is still seen everywhere today, in every computer in every home and business. Including yours!