Life Story: Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906-1992)

Grace Hopper was born on December 9, 1906 in New York City. She was the first of her parents’ three children. Grace was fortunate to grow up in a wealthy family that highly valued education. Her father, Walter Fletcher Murray, was an insurance salesman. Her mother, Mary Campbell Van Horne Hopper, was a housewife who loved to study math and encouraged Grace’s interest in the subject. Grace’s maternal grandfather was a civil engineer for the city of New York and often took Grace on surveying trips.

Grace’s family encouraged her to explore. When she was seven years old, she took apart her alarm clock to see how it worked. When she could not put it back together, she decided to expand her study by taking apart the seven other alarm clocks found throughout her family’s large house. Her mother supported her interest, but asked Grace to focus on one clock in the future. Later in life, Grace would describe her childhood as a place full of educated relatives, supportive parents, and a house full of books that fed her “insatiable curiosity.”

Grace attended the Hardridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey, before enrolling in Vassar College at the age of 18. In 1928, she graduated with a degree in mathematics. She went on to graduate school in mathematics at Yale, earning her master’s degree in 1930 and her Ph.D. in 1934. In 1930, Grace met and married Vincent Hopper. The couple had no children and divorced in 1945.

After completing her Ph.D., Grace joined the faculty at her alma mater, Vassar College. Grace eagerly transformed the study of math at Vassar. She threw away old textbooks, demanded strong writing from her math students, and updated the curriculum to include the latest research in the field of physics.

When the United States entered World War II, Grace found herself in a frustrating position. While many of her female friends and relatives volunteered for nursing positions, joined the military, or took jobs in factories, Grace was required to continue her job. As more men entered the military, male-dominated fields like math were in desperate need of workers. The government refused to accept volunteers who worked in high-need fields. In other words, they did not want to lose Grace’s intellect and experience to other forms of war work. While Grace respected this idea, she hated staying behind. She was embarrassed by the fact that she had a comfortable college teaching job while other women were directly contributing to the war.

Grace’s only option was to receive permission by Vassar College to leave her high-need position. Frustrated by her limited options, Grace gave Vassar an ultimatum. The college could grant her a temporary leave to join the military or track her down at basic training. One way or another, she was going off to serve her country. In 1943, Vassar gave Grace her wish. She immediately joined the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), a division of the U.S. Navy.

Military life changed her life completely. Grace was 37 years old, which made her older than many of the recruits. She did not care. She found teaching and advising college students to be stressful. The constraints of military life were liberating to her. She no longer had to make minor daily decisions like what to wear and what to eat. She described the experience as “the most complete freedom I’d ever had.”

In 1944, the Navy sent Lieutenant (junior grade) Grace Hopper to Harvard University to work on the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. The calculator was designed and built by IBM and nicknamed the Mark I. Hopper called it an “impressive beast.” It was 8 feet high, 51 feet long, 3 feet deep, and weighed almost 10,000 pounds. The term “computer programmer” wasn’t yet in use, but that was the task she tackled with two colleagues. They did complex calculations related to the war effort, including the design of the atomic bomb. She was the only woman on the team.

Grace had a remarkable ability to explain complex ideas, either to a highly technical audience, or to ordinary people. She was blunt, self-confident, and witty. These traits allowed her to succeed in the male-dominated field of computer science. She knew the men around her sometimes disliked her presence, including her own supervisor on the Mark project. Grace won over doubters with her intelligence.

Grace had a talent for programming and worked hard at it. She saw it as a set of steps made up by sequences of numbers. She quickly developed a deep understanding of the Mark computers. During a repair of the Mark II, she found a moth inside the machine. She taped it into the logbook and wrote “first actual case of bug being found.” (See the image connected to this life story!) “Bug” already meant “problem” in other fields. Thanks to Grace’s note, the term became part of everyday computer talk.

Newly divorced after the war, Grace turned down Vassar’s offer to return to teaching. She enjoyed computer programming too much. Grace eventually accepted a full-time job at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. As a senior programmer, she wrote a program called a compiler. It stored certain commands in the machine and made operations faster. Skeptical colleagues refused to believe such a program could work, but Grace successfully demonstrated that her ambitious idea was possible.

Grace’s compiler paved the way for modern programming languages that allow human operators to tell computers what to do with few commands. Companies around the world used her research to develop computer languages that people with noncomputer backgrounds could use to complete complex math, science, and engineering calculations. In the late 1950s, Grace worked with a group of programmers to develop a language that could be used by different kinds of businesses and on a variety of computers. Introduced in 1959, COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) became the most widely used computer coding language in the world.

After the war, Grace remained involved in the Navy as a reservist. She was lieutenant commander in 1946, and rose to commander in 1952. In 1966, Grace reluctantly retired because of her age. But less than one year later, the Navy asked 60-year-old Grace to return to active service. They wanted Commander Hopper to work on improving their computer programs. For the next 16 years, Grace worked with the Navy to create more standardized computer languages for a wide range of duties. Those who reported to her often described her as “Amazing Grace.”

Grace believed the structure of the Navy protected her from sexism she might have encountered in civilian life. She continued to serve until retiring a second time, at age 80, as Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. She was the oldest serving officer in the Navy at the time.

Throughout her career, Grace spoke publicly about the importance of computer science. She often encouraged young people to consider studying computers. She also enjoyed explaining how computers and coding worked, often carrying sample wires with her to lead basic demonstrations.

Constantly curious, Grace worked as a senior consultant with a private company for another year and a half until her death. She died in Arlington, Virginia, in 1992, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

• alma mater: The school or college that a person previously attended. 
• Arlington National Cemetery: A United States military cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. Usually considered the most famous and prestigious military cemetery in the country. 
• atomic bomb: A highly destructive and dangerous bomb that rapidly releases energy from the fission of atomic nuclei
• bug: In computers, an error, flaw, or failure in a program or system. 
• civil engineer: A professional who designs roads, bridges, and other public structures. 
• compiler: A program that gives a computer a series of instructions that allow it to complete complicated tasks quickly and without constant human input. 
• faculty: The teaching staff at a school. 
• insatiable: A person who has an unending desire or interest in something. 
• Ph.D.: An abbreviation for a doctorate degree. 
• reservist: A person who serves in the military’s reserve force. These individuals combine military work with civilian life. 
• surveying: A process by which a person records the land features of an area, including elevation, for the creation of a map.
• Vassar College: The second oldest degree-granting college for women in the United States, founded in 1861.