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VERIFIED FACTS - Post 19: The Women They Wrote Out of the Photo

Status: ROUND 1 COMPLETE

VERIFIED facts (matches Wikipedia/sources)

ENIAC unveiling (Feb 14/15, 1946)

  • Wikipedia: “announced to the public the evening of February 14, 1946… formally dedicated the next day” (Feb 15)
  • Post says “February 15, 1946 … unveiling ENIAC … to the press and the public” — this conflates the press event of Feb 14 with the formal dedication of Feb 15. Post is technically OK for “formal dedication day” but the press demonstration was Feb 14.

Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli (1921-2006) — CONFIRMED

  • Born Feb 12, 1921, Creeslough, Donegal, Ireland ✓ (Wikipedia: “Feymore, part of Creeslough”)
  • Died Apr 20, 2006, Wyndmoor, PA, age 85 ✓
  • Chestnut Hill College math degree June 1942 ✓
  • $1620 starting salary ✓
  • Invented subroutine ✓
  • Married Mauchly 1948 ✓ (“against the wishes of her parents” ✓)
  • ICHEC “Kay” supercomputer 2019 ✓

Jean Jennings Bartik (1924-2011) — CONFIRMED

  • Born Dec 27, 1924, Alanthus Grove, MO ✓
  • Died Mar 23, 2011, Poughkeepsie, NY ✓ (congestive heart failure)
  • B.S. mathematics Northwest Missouri State 1945 ✓ (“only mathematics degree in her class”)
  • Drupal “Bartik” theme ✓
  • Pioneer Programmer (2013, posthumous) ✓

Betty Snyder Holberton (1917-2001) — CONFIRMED

  • Born Mar 7, 1917, Philadelphia ✓
  • Died Dec 8, 2001, Rockville, MD, age 84 ✓ (heart disease, diabetes, stroke)
  • Penn journalism ✓; “raising children” quote on first day ✓
  • Breakpoint, sort-merge generator, UNIVAC console, gray-beige color ✓
  • Augusta Ada Lovelace Award 1997 ✓ (sole ENIAC programmer)
  • Holberton School founded 2015 ✓

Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer (1922-2008) — CONFIRMED

  • Born 1922, Philadelphia ✓
  • Temple 1942 ✓
  • Resigned 1947 to marry ✓
  • Died Dec 7, 2008, Yardley PA, age 86 ✓
  • Meals on Wheels, 500+ chemotherapy hats ✓ (Susan G. Komen referenced)

Frances Bilas Spence (1922-2012) — CONFIRMED

  • Born Mar 2, 1922, Philadelphia ✓
  • South Philadelphia HS for Girls (1938) ✓; Temple then Chestnut Hill ✓
  • 1942 mathematics + physics minor at Chestnut Hill ✓
  • Met Kay McNulty at Chestnut Hill ✓
  • Married Homer Spence 1947, 3 sons (Joseph, Richard, William) ✓
  • Died Jul 18, 2012, age 90 ✓ (Wikipedia confirms 2012 at 90)

Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum (1924-1986) — CONFIRMED

  • Born Feb 1, 1924, Bronx NY ✓
  • Jewish immigrants from Russia, father Simon a teacher ✓
  • Hunter College B.S. mathematics ✓
  • Trained next programmers at Aberdeen ✓
  • Married Adolph Teitelbaum Sep 1948 ✓ (Wikipedia says Sep 17)
  • Died Aug 9, 1986, Dallas TX, age 62 ✓

Adele Katz Goldstine (1920-1964) — CONFIRMED

  • Born Dec 21, 1920, NYC ✓
  • Father William emigrated Lithuania 1902 ✓
  • Hunter College then Michigan master’s at age 22 ✓
  • Met Herman Goldstine, married 1941 ✓
  • ENIAC operator’s manual 1946 ✓
  • Stored-program with Bartik and Clippinger ✓
  • Cancer 1962, died Nov 1964, age 43 ✓
  • Two children born 1952 and 1959 ✓

Klara Dan von Neumann (1911-1963) — MOSTLY CONFIRMED, NOTE on marriages

  • Born Aug 18, 1911, Budapest ✓
  • Figure skating champion at 14 ✓
  • Veres Palne Gimnazium 1929 ✓
  • POST SAYS: “married twice before she was twenty-seven — first Ferenc Engel, a gambler, then Andor Rapoch, an investment banker eighteen years her senior”
  • Wikipedia: “married three times before meeting von Neumann at Monte Carlo in 1938—first to Ferenc Engel (married 1931), then Andor Rapoch (married 1936)” — only TWO marriages mentioned, MATCHES the post’s count of two. (Earlier search summary mistakenly said “three” — should be TWO.)
  • Met von Neumann at Monte Carlo in 1938 ✓
  • Married Nov 17 1938 ✓ (his second, her third)
  • “Mrs. K. von Neumann” attribution ✓
  • Married Carl Eckart 1958 ✓
  • Died Nov 10, 1963 La Jolla, age 52 ✓
  • Suicide by drowning ✓

Mary Tsingou (b. 1928) — CONFIRMED

  • Born Oct 14, 1928, Milwaukee WI ✓
  • Greek immigrants from Bulgaria ✓
  • Returned to Bulgaria during Depression, back 1940 ✓
  • B.S. math + education U Wisconsin 1951 ✓
  • Master’s U Michigan 1955 ✓
  • MANIAC programmer with John Pasta ✓
  • FPUT problem ✓
  • Dauxois Physics Today 2008 ✓
  • Married Joseph Menzel 1958 ✓
  • James L. Tuck 1972 follow-up ✓
  • Retired 1991 ✓
  • Still alive (Wikipedia article suggests so)

Margaret Hamilton (b. 1936) — CONFIRMED

  • Born Aug 17, 1936, Paoli IN ✓
  • Earlham College 1958, BA math, philosophy minor ✓
  • Mid-1959 MIT meteorology under Lorenz ✓
  • LGP-30 and PDP-1 ✓
  • Hired Ellen Fetter 1961 ✓
  • SAGE at Lincoln Lab ✓ (1961-1963)
  • Apollo flight software ✓
  • Coined “software engineering” ✓
  • Presidential Medal of Freedom Nov 22, 2016 ✓

Ellen Fetter — CONFIRMED

  • Mount Holyoke math 1961 ✓
  • Joined MIT 1961, replaced Hamilton on Lorenz LGP-30 work ✓
  • 1963 “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow” acknowledgment ✓
  • Married John Gille (physicist) later ✓

Arianna Rosenbluth (1927-2020) — CONFIRMED

  • Born Sep 15, 1927, Houston TX ✓
  • Rice 1946, Radcliffe 1947 ✓
  • PhD Harvard physics 1949 at age 22, fifth woman PhD physics Harvard ✓
  • John Hasbrouck Van Vleck advisor ✓
  • Fencing: Texas women’s foil + Houston men’s championship ✓
  • Olympics 1944 cancelled, 1948 London no funds ✓
  • Married Marshall Rosenbluth 1951 ✓
  • MANIAC 1952 H-bomb ✓
  • 1953 Metropolis paper authors: Metropolis, A. Rosenbluth, M. Rosenbluth, A. Teller, E. Teller ✓
  • Died Dec 28, 2020, COVID-19, age 93 ✓
  • 4 children, divorced 1978 ✓

Kathy Kleiman — CONFIRMED Harvard undergraduate

  • Harvard undergraduate when she discovered ENIAC programmers ✓
  • “Proving Ground” published July 2022 ✓
  • Documentary “The Computers” ✓

McNulty/Antonelli father details — CONFIRMED

  • Father IRA training officer ✓
  • Imprisoned in Derry Gaol for two years (post says “imprisoned” w/o duration) ✓
  • Family emigrated October 1924, settled Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia ✓
  • Spoke only Irish at arrival, prayers in Irish for life ✓

Klara von Neumann death — CONFIRMED

  • 15 pounds wet sand in dress ✓
  • Blood alcohol 0.18% ✓
  • Asphyxia by drowning ✓
  • Ruled suicide by San Diego coroner ✓

MANIAC computer graphics — CONFIRMED

  • Tsingou and John Pasta wrote first computer graphics program ✓
  • Visualized explosion on an oscilloscope ✓

April 1948 first Monte Carlo on ENIAC — CONFIRMED

  • April 1948: John & Klara von Neumann + Nick Metropolis at Aberdeen ✓
  • 32 days straight (1948 - this is the correct context, NOT 1950 weather)
  • Klara responsible for diagramming and coding Monte Carlo algorithm ✓
  • “Testing the conveniency of the H-bomb” claim found in Klara’s own letters ✓ (Lost Women of Science S2)

DISCREPANCY 1: Trajectory time

Post says: “20 seconds — a problem that took a human computer 40 hours to solve by hand” Wikipedia ENIAC: “trajectory of a missile in 15 seconds, a task that would have taken several weeks for a human computer” WebSearch summary: alternative reports of “30 seconds” / “20 hours for 60-second trajectory” / “3 days”

Note: The “20 seconds” figure is commonly cited in Kleiman’s book “Proving Ground” (2022). The “40 hours” figure does appear in some Kleiman/EPP materials in reference to a single trajectory taking 40 hours by hand. So although Wikipedia disagrees, the post’s specific pairing matches Kleiman’s account. Mark as: cited and defensible to source, but reviewers should note Wikipedia inconsistency. NOT a clear error.

DISCREPANCY 2: Klara von Neumann + 1950 weather forecast (CRITICAL)

Post says: “She worked for 32 days on the project, managing 100 000 punch cards. A 2021 Smithsonian correction later clarified that her primary contribution was writing and checking the code and training the meteorologists to program the ENIAC – she was not merely a punch-card operator, as earlier accounts had implied. She was the programmer.”

ISSUES:

  1. The “32 days” actually refers to the 1948 Monte Carlo work (Apr 1948: 32 days straight), NOT the 1950 weather forecast (which took ~33 days according to one source). The post conflates two separate events.
  2. The “100,000 punch cards” claim was explicitly corrected by Smithsonian (per their editor’s note): “in fact she wasn’t present for this part of the experiment.”
  3. The 2021 Smithsonian correction actually went the OPPOSITE direction from the post’s framing. The correction DOWNGRADED Klara’s role on the weather forecast — historian Tom Haigh found “absolutely no evidence” she wrote or ran the weather forecast code. Her documented role was advising on coding technique and checking the final code (as stated in 1950 paper acknowledgments).
  4. The post says “She was the programmer” — this is the very claim Smithsonian had to retract. The actual programmers/operators were ballistics lab staff (possibly Hedi Selberg and Margaret Smagorinsky).

RECOMMENDED REWRITE: Klara’s documented contribution to the 1950 weather forecast was teaching the ENIAC coding technique and checking the final code. She was the world’s leading expert on ENIAC coding by then — but the operators in 1950 were others. (Save the “32 days / 100,000 cards” detail for the 1948 Monte Carlo work, where it actually belongs.)

DISCREPANCY 3: ENIAC unveiling date

  • Press conference/announcement to public: evening of Feb 14, 1946
  • Formal dedication ceremony: Feb 15, 1946
  • Post says “February 15, 1946 … unveiling ENIAC … to the press and the public at the Moore School”
  • The Feb 15 was the formal dedication; the press demo was Feb 14 evening. The post is technically defensible as referring to the formal unveiling day, but readers should note both dates have been cited.

DISCREPANCY 4: Klara’s marriages (minor language)

Post: “She married twice before she was twenty-seven” — this is accurate (Engel 1931, Rapoch 1936). The earlier Wikipedia fetch summary erroneously phrased it as “three times before meeting von Neumann” but on review, this counted von Neumann himself as the third. Post is CORRECT.

ENIAC dedication date

  • Press demonstration: evening of Feb 14, 1946
  • Formal dedication: Feb 15, 1946
  • Post says “February 15, 1946 … unveiling … to the press and the public at the Moore School” — this is awkward because the press conference was actually Feb 14, and Feb 15 was the formal dedication.

Sources consulted

  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Antonelli
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bartik
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Holberton
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlyn_Meltzer
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Spence
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Teitelbaum
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Goldstine
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_Dan_von_Neumann
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Tsingou
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Fetter
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianna_W._Rosenbluth
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
  • eniacprogrammers.org/eniac-programmers-project/founder/