Robert Coe <bob@1776.COM> hath wroth:

>To those of us of a certain age, "WPA" stands for "Works Progress
>Administration", the makework program set up by Franklin Roosevelt to combat
>the effects of the Great Herbert Clark Hoover Republican Depression of the
>1930s.

I'm not that old. Herbert Hoover was elected President in Nov 1928
and took office in January 1929. The initial market crash was on Oct
24, 1929. Hoover must have really been busy during his first 10
months in office to do all that damage. There was much more happening
than the prez could possibly have caused:
http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=165701
However, I will admit that the Republicans controlled both houses
during the 1920's, until 1931, where the Democrats controlled just the
House, and 1933 where the Democrats controlled both.

>Unemployed laborers fixed roads, planted trees, spruced up national
>parks, etc. Unemployed mathematicians were put to work calculating logarithms
>by hand.

The old story is that the union representative was complaining to the
owner about the huge steam shovel that just put 100 men out of work.
The owner retorted with "why not 1000 men with teaspoons"? Progress
is a difficult genie to shove back into the bottle.

>Until the late 1950s, when computers started taking over such
>calculations, the "WPA tables" were considered the most accurate and reliable
>tables of logarithms ever published.

That's when a computer was someone that did computation. The trend
continued through WWII where rooms full of "computers" were employed
calculating artillery ballistics and bombsight tables. I've repaired
a few old mechanical calculators (Marchant, Monroe, Friden, Burroughs,
etc) that I first used to grind numbers in the early 1960's for a long
departed aircraft factory. Electronic computer? Whazzat?


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
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Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558