A Pioneering Use of Early Computers in Weather and Mortality Research: Ellsworth Huntington’s Work with New York Life Insurance Companies in the 1920s

Abstract

Geographers are familiar with Ellsworth Huntington’s influential, yet frequently derided, claims about climatic determinism, eugenics, and the progress of civilization. His work on weather and mortality in New York City, a study conducted under the auspices of the National Research Council and with the extensive collaboration of New York–based life insurance companies, offers a different insight into Huntington’s approach. Although the results of this 1920s research project had a limited impact on the field, the work that produced it represents one of the earliest examples of using computing technology in the atmospheric sciences. Drawing on archival research at Yale University and the National Academy of Sciences, the article argues that not only can Huntington be considered pioneering in his use of early computers but the use of such machines constrained the research in important ways. The limited funding and processing capabilities of early computers, standardized punch card designs, necessary labor and staff time, and clerks’ learned practices all came to define the research project. This demonstrates that early computers did not simply enable more efficient numerical analysis of geographical problems but rather that they were part of sociotechnical configurations that were coemergent from the situated development of technologies within user communities.