We had created a sort of mass-production system, a mathematical assembly line where each “computer”—that’s what we called people hired to do mathematical calculations—had to do a single type of operation, over and over and over again, this one was the multiplier, and she was the adder, and this one cubed, so all she did was cube this number and send it to the next one down the line, and with that we achieved amazing speeds to try and get these massive, multilayered computations ready on time for the big test at Trinity. It was uncanny watching these women (most of them were women) behaving
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