In 1944 the Allies needed to know exactly what the water would do on a coast called "Position Z." So a deaf mathematician and six young women in a basement near Liverpool calculated the future.
In this episode
- Arthur Doodson: the deaf mathematician at the Liverpool Tidal Institute, the world's leading authority on tides, who guessed he was predicting a Normandy landing and said nothing
- Six women working as Computers: hired for their diligence, skill with numbers, and neat handwriting, they ran the harmonic analysis and operated the tide-predicting machines
- The tide predicting machines: the Bidston Kelvin machine and the Roberts Légé machine, analogue computers made of brass, gears, and pulleys.
- D-Day: The largest seaborne invasion in history
Episode Music
Additional Notes
For the group photo of the women who calculated the tides after the war, and for what didn’t make it into this episode, visit notes.foundinthemachine.com.
Special thank you to Angelina at the Bidston Observatory who responded to my inquiries as I looked for the women's names. Bidston Observatory has been converted into an artistic research centre and more information about it can be found here.
Additional Reading
Bidston Lighthouse. (2017, March 8). Women in the workplace. http://www.bidstonlighthouse.org.uk/women-in-the-workplace/
Carlsson-Hyslop, A. E. (2010). An anatomy of storm surge science at Liverpool Tidal Institute 1919-1959: Forecasting, practices of calculation and patronage [Doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester]. NERC Open Research Archive. https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/14623/
Friends of Bidston Hill. (n.d.). Bidston Observatory. http://www.bidstonhill.org.uk/heritage/trail08/
Parker, B. B. (2011). The tide predictions for D-Day. Physics Today, 64(9), 35-40. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.1257
Scoffield, J. (2016, November 9). My early life at Bidston Observatory. Bidston Observatory in Retrospect. http://www.bidstonobservatory.org.uk/early-life/
Woodworth, P. L. (2020). Tide prediction machines at the Liverpool Tidal Institute. History of Geo- and Space Sciences, 11(1), 15-29. https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-11-15-2020
Woodworth, P. L. (2015, December). Bidston Observatory and its tide prediction machines. Bidston Observatory in Retrospect. http://www.bidstonobservatory.org.uk/tide-prediction-machines/
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