Design for a Machine, French, eighteenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1962.

Technology

Volume XIV, Number 1 | winter 2021

Miscellany

In August 1945 pioneering computer programmer Grace Hopper was working at Harvard University on the experimental Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical protocomputer being used in the war effort. After a circuit malfunctioned, one of her colleagues removed a two-inch-long moth using tweezers. Hopper taped the moth into her logbook and later recalled the first use of a now ubiquitous term: “From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.”

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?

—William Law, 1728