Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

342 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40)
An indispensable tool of physicists are the mathematical tables of
functions, such as exponentials, logarithms, and probability functions, neces-
sary in determining mathematical problems as varied as the diffraction of
sound and electromagnetic waves, the potential of radiofrequency transmis-
sion lines, and electrical and thermal diffusion. The tables are fundamental
in the solution of problems ranging from heat conduction and wave motion,
the diffusion of a searchlight beam by fog, and the production of knock in
gasoline engine cylinders, to the oscillations of an ultrahigh frequency radio
tube.
Scientists in this country as a rule relied on partial tables made up as
needed. In the universities sporadic attempts had been made to formulate
more comprehensive tables, but there was nothing comparable to the mathe-
matical services available to scientists abroad, such as that established in the
early thirties by the British Association for the Advancement of Science.133
Then in January 1938 at a conference called by the Works Projects Adminis-
tration to aid unemployed scientists (it was assumed there must be some,
though they had not been heard from), Dr. Briggs proposed that the Bureau
sponsor establishment of a central agency for computing fundamental tables
of importance in various fields of applied mathematics. Dr. Arnold N.
Lowan, Hungarian-born professor of physics in residence at the new Insti-
tute for Advanced Study at Princeton and part-time teacher at Brooklyn
College, was offered the directorship of the project. That summer the pro-
gram was set up in a vacant loft building off Columbus Circle in New York.
As it was WPA policy to provide work in its projects for as many
unemployed as possible, and as almost no equipment of any kind could be
provided, the planning staff assemiled by Dr. Lowan devised a self-checking,
hand-computing procedure of preparing tables that could be performed in a
series of simple, single stages. Over 400 individuals from the relief rolls,
with a variety of talents but none of them trained scientists, and in most
instances with no mathematical background whatever, were set to work with
paper and pencils on the initial basic projects. These were to prepare the
16-place values of natural logarithms, the 15-place values of probability func-
tions, and the 10-place values of Bessel functions of complex arguments. A
few desk calculators and adding machines were acquired by the directing
staff to check the tabulations and were also used by a select group whose more
complex task it was to determine values of polynomials for integral arguments.
Electronic equipment that became available less than a decade later
performed in minutes what 400 pencil-computers took months to do, but the
Some German tables were available to their scientists but were not in print. The
British work was still in progress, and most of the Bureau tables came out before theirs
did. Conversation with Miss Irene A. Stegun, Feb. 18, 1964.