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HISTORIES OF
COMPUTING
[MICHAEL SEAN MAHONEY]
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS HAIGH

logy is pervasive in
, its role ever more
important as it becomes embedded
in a myriad of physical systems and
disciplinary ways of thinking. The late
Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer
scholar of the history of computing, one
of the first established historians of
science to take seriously the challenges
and opportunities posed by information
technology to our understanding of the
twentieth century.
Mahoney’s work ranged widely, from
logic and the theory of computation
to the development of software and
applications as craft-work. But it was
always informed by a unique perspective
derived from his distinguished work
on the history of medieval mathematics
and experimental practice during the
Scientific Revolution. His writings
offered a new angle on very recent
events and ideas and bridged the
gaps between academic historians
and computer scientists. Indeed,
he came to believe that the held was
irreducibly pluralistic and that there
could be only histories of computing.
In this collection, Thomas Haigh
presents thirteen of Mahoney’s essays
and papers organized across three
categories: historiography, software
engineering, and theoretical computer
science. His introduction surveys
Mahoney’s work to trace the development
of key themes, illuminate connections
among different areas of his research,
and put his contributions into context.
The volume also includes an essay on
Mahoney by his former students Jed Z.
Buchwald and D. Graham Burnett. The
result is a landmark work, of interest
to computer profession.ahs ns well as
historians of te science.

HISTORIES OF COMPUTING
MICHAEL SEAN MAHONEY
Edited and with an introduction by Thomas Haigh
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Pages 241-242 constitute an extension to the copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mahoney, Michael S. (Michael Sean)
Histories of computing / by Michael Sean Mahoney ; edited and
with an introduction by Thomas Haigh.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-05568-1 (alk. paper)
1. Computer science—History. 2. Software engineering—
History. 3. Computers—History. I. Haigh, Thomas, 1972- II. Title.
QA76.17.M34 2011
004—dc22 2010047555

Contents
List of Figures vii
Unexpected Connections, Powerful Precedents, and
Big Questions: The Work of Michael Sean Mahoney
on the History of Computing 1
Thomas Haigh
PART ONE Shaping the History of Computing
1 The History of Computing in the History
of Technology 21
2 What Makes History? 38
3 Issues in the History of Computing 42
4 The Histories of Computing(s) 55
PART TWO Constructing a History for Software
5 Software: The Self-Programming Machine 77
6 Extracts from The Roots of Software Engineering 86
7 Finding a History for Software Engineering 90

VI CONTENTS
8 Boys’ Toys and Women’s Work: Feminism Engages
Software 106
PART three The Structures of Computation
9 Computing and Mathematics at Princeton in the 1950s 121
10 Computer Science: The Search for a Mathematical
Theory 128
11 Extracts from Computers and Mathematics:
The Search for a Discipline of Computer Science 147
12 The Structures of Computation and the Mathematical
Structure of Nature 158
13 Extracts from Software as Science—Science as Software 183
Eloge: Michael Sean Mahoney, 1939-2008 197
Jed Z. Buchwald and D. Graham Burnett
Notes 205
Acknowledgments 241
Index 245

List of Figures
Figure 1: The machine-centered view of the history of computing 58
Figure 2: Sources of ENIAC and EDVAC 60
Figure 3: Architecture of EDVAC 61
Figure 4: The communities of computing 62
Figure 5: Levels of modeling in software development 105
Figure 6: The agenda leading from John von Neumann to the Santa Fe
Institute 164
Figure 7: The agendas of automata and formal languages 167
Figure 8: The agendas of semantics 171
Figure 9: A formulation of list-processing in terms of homomorphisms
and a proof of the correctness of a simpler compiler 176

Unexpected Connections, Powerful Precedents,
and Big Questions
The Work of Michael Sean Mahoney on the History of Computing
Thomas Haigh
Within the history of computing community, Mike Mahoney
stood out for being, as I once called him when introducing him
at Colby College, an “old school” historian of science.1 His in¬
tellectual taste was impeccable and his standards high. Few, if any, of his
public lectures on computing proceeded without at least one reference to
Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, or Christiaan Huygens. Although he had
trained himself as an expert in the early literature of theoretical computer
science, he was also a skilled reader of sixteenth-century Latin and prone
to lament that few students today could read Newton’s Principia Matbe-
matica in the original. The latter, he explained with a touch of pride, re¬
quired not just a knowledge of Latin but also deep familiarity with the
mathematical notation and scientific practice of the period. Yet he was by
no means fusty. Instead Mahoney’s vision of the history of computing re¬
flected his openness to a broad range of approaches. Such quickness of wit
and breadth of knowledge could prove intimidating to those of us whose
historical knowledge stretched little beyond the late nineteenth century.
His death deprived our community of a unique perspective that is unlikely
to be replicated.
Mahoney’s instinct was to situate the field in broader and deeper his¬
torical intellectual currents, flowing from both the history of science and
the history of technology. His papers on the history of computing, gath¬
ered in this volume, reflect this intellectual virtuosity. They span an im¬
pressive range of topics but are united by a concern for the creation of
new concepts, practices, and intellectual communities through the re¬
combination and reinterpretation of old ones. In this respect his papers

2 CONNECTIONS, PRECEDENTS, AND QUESTIONS
on historiography, software engineering, and computer science—the three
areas into which I have gathered his work—ask similar questions and sug¬
gest similar answers.
Historiographic Work
Mahoney’s most influential contribution to the development of the
history of computing as a thriving and somewhat respectable field of
scholarly labor came from his series of historiographic papers pub¬
lished from 1988 to 2008. This was the first area of the history of com¬
puting that Mahoney approached, but it was a topic that he returned to
again and again. These papers constitute the most sustained and self-
conscious examination so far attempted of the fundamental question
hanging over our growing body of work: what is the history of comput¬
ing a history of?
The first, “The History of Computing in the History of Technology,”
appeared in 1988 in Annals of the History of Computing. It is one of the
most widely cited papers ever written on the history of computing.2 In 1988
the “history of computing” was by no means a novel object of study: An¬
nals was already in its tenth volume, and the MIT Press series History of
Computing was growing rapidly. Yet work had so far been carried out
almost exclusively by aging computer pioneers, joined by a growing but
still tiny body of young historians whose dissertation research addressed
computing. Mahoney was a tenured professor of history at one of the
world’s leading universities, and so his choice of the history of computing
as one of his primary research interests was in itself something of a wa¬
tershed moment for the field.3
At this time Annals was published by a consortium of professional
computing societies, and its readership was made up largely of computer
experts rather than trained historians. This was Mahoney’s first pub¬
lished communication to this community, yet he did not waste space on
false praise either of existing technical and business histories or of the
willingness of historians to address vital questions related to information
technology.
Instead Mahoney made it very clear that his embrace of the field re¬
flected a belief in the inherent importance of its subject matter rather than
a high opinion of anything so far accomplished by its researchers. The
paper briskly asserts the centrality of computers to science, business, the
“information society,” and the “new concepts of information” believed to
underlie it. Historians, he continued, were failing to rise to the challenge.

THE WORK OF MICHAEL SEAN MAHONEY 3
,r
Despite the pervasive presence of computing in modern science and technol¬
ogy, not to mention modern society itself, the history of computing has yet
to establish a significant presence in the history of science and technology.
Meetings of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of
Technology in recent years have included very few sessions devoted spe¬
cifically to history of computing, and few of the thematic sessions have in¬
cluded contributions from the perspective of computing.
Mahoney took just two sentences to rule out existing scholarship in the
field as a source of insight.
There is a small body of professionally historical work, dealing for the most
part with the origins of the computer, its invention and early development. . ..
It is meant as no denigration of that work to note that it stops at the point
where computing becomes a significant presence in science, technology, and
society.
The force and abruptness of this dismissal is striking. Four years earlier,
the young historian William Aspray had undertaken a similar survey of the
history of computing in Isis, the most staid and venerable journal of the
history of science. Aspray took a more conventional approach, dutifully
surveying the existing literature and balancing his calls for attention to
various pressing needs with an appreciation of existing accomplishments.
Mahoney, in contrast, used vivid language to place himself and the rest of
the historical profession in a position of hopeful ignorance.
Historians stand before the daunting complexity of a subject that has grown
exponentially in size and variety, which looks not so much like an uncharted
ocean as like a trackless jungle. We pace on the edge, pondering where to cut in.
“The question,” he suggested, “is how to bring the history of comput¬
ing into line with what should be its parent discipline.” He concluded,
“Pursued within the larger enterprise of the history of technology, the
history of computing will acquire the context of place and time that gives
history meaning.” This was itself an interesting choice. Mahoney’s train¬
ing as an intellectual historian of science might have led him to dismiss
the history of technology as a dull and low-status field, devoid of big
ideas. He could easily have positioned the computer as a creation of sci¬
ence, an embodiment of mathematical logic, and the most important
laboratory instrument ever invented. Indeed his work would explore these
very perspectives. Yet his agenda for the history of computing was firmly
rooted in the grubbier world of technology.
To sketch the outlines of a possible history of computing rooted within
the history of technology, Mahoney offered questions rather than answers.

Specifically, he posed a number of “big questions’ gleaned from major
works in the history of technology, placing the computer in comparative
perspective with earlier technologies. Echoing the main concerns of his¬
torians of technology in the 1970s and early 1980s, they were concerned
particularly with the organization of work, the relationship of science and
technology, the professional development of engineering knowledge, and
(rather less typically for this period) the materiality of computer technol¬
ogy and the importance of tinkering and communities of enthusiasts to its
shaping and spread.
In 1993 Mahoney made another argumentative introduction to the
field in his paper “Issues in the History of Computing,” presented to an
audience of computer scientists gathered for a conference on the history
of programming languages. Of all the Ph.D. historians involved with the
history of computing, Mahoney spent the most time and effort working
with technical communities to spread awareness of history and guide their
historical initiatives in productive directions. As someone who has at¬
tempted to reach audiences within computer science and information
science, I can testify to the difficulty involved in convincing such audi¬
ences that Ph.D. historians hold important skills, perspectives, or re¬
search questions usually lacking in the work of those with an avocationai
interest in the technical developments of their own fields. It is easy to
cause offense and hard to change minds. Mahoney’s work for such audi¬
ences is a model of its kind: charmingly self-deprecating, eminently rea¬
sonable, elegantly argued, yet unsparing in its dismissal of Whig history
and antiquarianism. This stemmed, perhaps, from his genuine respect for
computer scientists and deep immersion in the discipline’s technical
literature.
Five years on from his earlier paper, Mahoney remained unimpressed
with the existing literature, most of which had been written by partici¬
pants rather than trained historians. His words recall historian of science
Thomas Kuhn’s definition of the state of a “preparadigmatic” research
field.4 According to Mahoney, in the history of computing, sources are
abundant, but “we have lots of answers but very few questions, lots of
stories but no history, lots of things to do but no sense of how to do them
or in what order. Simply put, we don’t yet know what the history of com¬
puting is really about.” Writers from the computing community were
preoccupied with establishing credit for “firsts,” and computing was still
“invisible” within the Society for the History of Technology.
Mahoney offered three main suggestions to remedy this and drag the
history of computing into a more productive relationship with the con¬
cerns and insights of more mature historical fields. Rather than focus

exclusively on great men and breakthrough accomplishments, Mahoney
believed that historians of computing should document and interpret
common practices and expose the importance of tacit knowledge to the
field. This, as he made explicit elsewhere, he took from Kuhn’s arguments
for the centrality to science of routine problem-solving procedures.5 He
called for general attention to the role of “commerce,” in which he included
both the use of computers in business and the role of research-funding
agencies in shaping the evolution of computing technology. He chal¬
lenged historians to use insights from historical and sociological work on
the development of professions, particularly the insights of Andrew Ab¬
bott, to explore the evolution of professional identities around the com¬
puter and the demarcation of occupational jurisdictions.
Mahoney’s final major contribution to the historiography of comput¬
ing came with his 2005 paper “The Histories of Computing(s).” In this
Mahoney offers a new kind of answer to his old question: what is the
history of computing about? His answer: many different things, because
it is not the history of one thing but of many. Looking back, one sees this
theme even in his earliest work on the subject. In his 1988 paper, Ma¬
honey had noted that
The computer is not one thing, but many different things, and the same
holds true of computing. There is about both terms a deceptive singularity
to which we fall victim when, as is now common, we prematurely unite its
multiple historical sources into a single stream, treating Charles Babbage’s
analytical engine and George Boole’s algebra of thought as if they were con¬
ceptually related by something other than twentieth-century hindsight.
We have tended, he observed in 2005, to take a “machine-centered” view
of its history, “tracing its origins back to the abacus and the first mechani¬
cal calculators and then following its evolution through the generations of
mainframe, mini, and micro.” Scholars in the history of technology have
been increasingly turning their attention to technology in use, and given
the flexibility of computer technology it seems particularly appropriate here.
Yet historical periodization around machine generations and depiction of
a family tree of great machines going back to ENIAC are built around
hardware technologies and computer producers. If one is interested in us¬
ers and applications this makes no sense at all.
In this paper Mahoney applied the same analytical tools to the concep¬
tualization of the history of computing that he had been applying to
understand the construction of computer science and software engineer¬
ing. In particular he was interested in the hunt for precedents and the
ways in which historical analogies can become locked into the structure

of a field. His illustrations for this paper provide an impressively direct
statement of his concept. On the one hand we see the hourglass shape of
the “history of computing,” in which earlier technologies shaped ENIAC
and its compatriots, which in turn give birth to subsequent generations
of computers with an ever-wider range of applications (see fig. 1 in chap¬
ter 4). On the other lie the “histories of computing(s),” in which social
practices in a variety of communities (business, scientific fields, industrial
production, and so forth) are gradually restructured around the possibili¬
ties of computer technology (see fig. 4 in chapter 4).
Mahoney did a lot to legitimate “the history of computing” as the iden¬
tity of a respectable area of study, so it is striking that in his final historio¬
graphic work he turned away from that particular frame in favor of an
explicitly plural alternative centered on users and practices. In this paper
Mahoney identifies and acknowledges the influence of a few streams of
promising work in these areas, reflecting the growing maturity of historical
scholarship on computing since the publication of his 1988 paper. This is
almost unique in his published work. Mahoney’s papers rarely cite work
by others in the history of computing and give the impression of a lone
historian fighting a brave battle against an overwhelming mass of primary
sources and urgent research questions. That impression is misleading. In
fact he was deeply engaged with other scholars within our field, a keen
participant on panels and in workshops, and consistently interested in the
work of graduate students.
Mahoney’s argument in this paper tacks gracefully to address two po¬
tentially contradictory objectives. The first is his urge to strip away the
rhetoric of revolution in which the computer has been enveloped since its
invention. Computers, we have been told for more than sixty years now,
are so much more powerful and important than any earlier technologies
that it would be at best pointless, and at worst dangerous, to use history
as a guide. Mahoney rightly tied this rhetoric to the discredited concept
of technological determinism and the idea that technologies “impact”
upon a society. Instead his urge was always to compare computers with
other technologies, from windmills to cars.
One would be surprised if a serious historian of technology, particularly
one with Mahoney’s broad range of interests, took any other position.
Discovering unexpected parallels between phenomena ancient and modern
is, after all, our intellectual party trick. In contrast, if a historian accepts
uncritically the assumption of his or her historical subjects that their group,
nation, or technology has a unique character and requires special kinds of
explanation, then the historian’s work is liable to be dismissed as simple-
minded. Among academic historians, for example, to suggest that a col-

league has implicitly accepted the idea of American exceptionalism is not a
compliment. Analysts of computing are likewise vulnerable to naive en¬
dorsement of what I like to call computer exceptionalism, rather than see¬
ing the computer as one important technology among many.
Yet Mahoney’s second impulse ran in the opposing direction. Like many
of us, he suspected that deep down, there really was something special
about computer technology. Why, after all, had he been drawn to spend
decades immersing himself in its mysteries? So immediately after proving
his historical credentials by denouncing the rhetoric of the computer revo¬
lution, Mahoney pivoted to explore just what makes the computer, after
all, an exceptional technology.
[The stored program digital computer] could ... do things no earlier ma¬
chine had been able to do, namely, make logical decisions based on the cal¬
culations it was carrying out and modify its own instructions. .. . Capable
of calculating any logical function, it could become anything but was in it¬
self nothing (well, as designed, it could always do arithmetic).
Invocation of the computer’s special powers as a universal machine is a
widely used rhetorical flourish, but in this case Mahoney challenges us to
combine it with his earlier dismissal of the idea of a computer revolution.
Universality should be the starting point of a serious comparative exami¬
nation of the computer as a technology, not a devastating first strike on
the idea that computing has important historical precedents. This explains
Mahoney’s particular interest in software as the thing that makes a com¬
puter a computer. Computer hardware is just another kind of complex
technology. Computer software is something unique, a self-executing text
bridging Mahoney’s interests in mathematics and machinery. The immate¬
riality of software, however, posed new challenges to the historian.
Software Engineering
Mahoney explored these challenges in his work on the history of soft¬
ware and software engineering. This was his first major area of interest
in the history of computing, and at one point he planned a book on the
topic.6 An overview of his concern with software is given in the short
article “Software: The Self-Programming Machine.” This explains his
particular interest in systems software as the crucial innovation making
it practical to program the computer for a wide range of applications. As
he put it, “if application software is about getting the computer to do
something useful in the world, systems software is about getting the com¬
puter to do the applications programming.”

Mahoney called many times for a detailed examination of the actual
practices of computing, and particularly those of programming, but he
never took up his own invitation. This remains an underdeveloped topic
within the history of computing, in contrast to work in other areas of sci¬
ence studies and the history of technology.7 The papers he wrote on the
history of software and software engineering are closer in style, content,
and concerns to his historiographic work than they are to his detailed
descriptions of theoretical computer science. The development of soft¬
ware engineering is sketched or alluded to rather than being presented in
depth as a narrative. Though a number of prominent computer scientists
and system software developers are quoted at length, we never really learn
who these people are, how their ideas were formed and around what kind
of practice, what their broader agendas were, or whether anything they
said had a direct influence on the subsequent development of program¬
ming work. Neither do we get a sense of the institutional and disciplinary
interests involved. The development of specific programming methodolo¬
gies in the 1970s and 1980s is neglected here, as it generally has been in
the work of others concerned with the same issues.
Instead Mahoney launched a sustained examination of precedent and
the construction of historical understandings within technical communi¬
ties. This theme is central to his two historiographic papers of the 1990s,
his work on the history of software engineering, and much of his work on
the emergence of theoretical computer science. Comparison of the com¬
puter with earlier technologies was not only, he suggested, a way of find¬
ing some meaningful research questions for historians grappling with its
mysteries. It was also the means by which historical actors themselves had
understood the potential of the new technology and shaped their own
plans for its development. The theme received its most direct statement in
his 1990 paper “The Roots of Software Engineering”: “Nothing is really
unprecedented. Faced with a new situation, people liken it to familiar ones
and shape their responses on the basis of the perceived similarities.”
“Finding a History for Software Engineering,” the most mature state¬
ment of his work in the area, embeds this insight into the very structure
of the paper. He identifies three intersecting agendas for the development
of software engineering: applied science, mechanical engineering, and
industrial engineering.
The Ford Model T appears repeatedly as an object of comparison with
the computer in Mahoney’s work. He observed that his historical actors
were themselves invoking the Model T as an inspiration for the mass
production of software, producing programs on an assembly line rather
than by traditional craft practices. Mahoney discussed this both in “Issues

in the History of Computing” (where he looked at computer pioneer
Grace Hopper’s use of the metaphor) and in his papers on the origins of
software engineering. In the former he wrote that “there is history built
into it, as there is in the notion of engineering itself. . . . There were other
ways to think about writing programs for computers.” The choice of a
precedent determines the assumptions behind a field and so shapes its
further direction. Ignorance of this history thus deprived practitioners of
an understanding of the assumptions built into their own work practices.
Mahoney himself was aware of the dangers of misinterpreting such his¬
torical icons, particularly as the computer had not yet accomplished any
similar transformation of daily life and work in America. His insights
here were shaped by his teaching more than by his research, particularly
his commitment to undergraduate seminars exploring crucial technolo¬
gies in their social contexts and his instructional concept of “reading a
machine” for which he took the Model T as his paradigm.8
The other main topic in these papers is the “software crisis,” an idea
Mahoney first referred to in “The History of Computing in the History of
Technology” and made central to his work on software engineering. This
has been the most widely discussed topic in the history of software over
the past twenty years.9 Mahoney tied the attractiveness of software engi¬
neering as a new identity to the prevalence of a sense of crisis around large-
scale programming projects in the late 1960s. He drew attention to the
1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering as a pivotal moment in
this process, both in demarcating the nature of that crisis and in building
an elite consensus that new approaches were needed. Drawing on his inter¬
est in integrating the history of computing with broad themes in the history
of technology, he invoked the specter of Frederick W. Taylor and his laws
of scientific management as the animating force behind much of this dis¬
cussion of standardizing methods for the production of software. While
other scholars, most notably Donald McKenzie, worked on the topic
around the same time, it is clear that Mahoney’s conception of the crisis
has been extremely influential on the work of subsequent scholars.10
Mahoney had a deep interest in the history of one particular software
system: UNIX. As he began to immerse himself in the world of computing
science during the 1980s, many key members of the team responsible for
UNIX were still working in the flagship Bell Labs facility in Murray Hill,
not far from Princeton. UNIX provided an exceptionally clear example of
the link connecting the social context in which a software system was
developed, its technical architecture, and its strengths and weaknesses.
Mahoney conducted several interviews during the late 1980s with the
creators of UNIX and later enlisted Princeton students to work further on

this “Unix Oral Histories Project,” material from which is available on¬
line, though it was never fully edited or formally published. When Linux
surged in popularity during the late 1990s, Mahoney adopted it for his
personal use and was often seen wearing a promotional red hat from the
Linux vendor of the same name.
His only published discussion of UNIX comes in the paper “Boys’ Toys
and Women’s Work,” most of which is included in this volume. It begins
in a similar vein to his historiographic work, dutifully identifying ques¬
tions from the social history of technology relevant to the history of women
in computing. For a moment he seemed in danger of falling into the very
trap he later identified in “The Histories of Computing(s)” by assuming a
single history of computing beginning with ENIAC and a single profes¬
sional “field” from which the disappearance of women over the course of
the 1950s must be explained. But he then made an abrupt turn into de¬
tailed critique of two papers on the gendered sociology of programming
and in doing so he made his own arguments about the assumptions and
social organization embedded in UNIX. According to Mahoney, the tool¬
box philosophy guiding UNIX was deeply grounded within computer
science, supported what would later be called rapid prototyping, and was
deliberately based on a “hacker” philosophy.
The last of Mahoney’s papers on software is “What Makes the History
of Computing Hard and Why Does It Matter?” published in IEEE An¬
nals of the History of Computing. A revised version of “The Histories of
Computing(s),” it was delivered at a 2007 Austrian workshop on “Me¬
thodic and Didactic Challenges of the History of Informatics,” a rather
ponderous title apparently chosen for its ability to be shortened to “Med-
ichi.” Again Mahoney had given himself the challenge of explaining good
historical practice to an audience of distinguished computer scientists with
an avocational interest in the history of their field. His choice of material
underlines the historiographic character of his work on software history.
For this venue he removed the introductory reflections on the role of the
historian and the concluding section on the importance of computing to
the humanities, stripped out some of the historiographic detail, made
minor changes to the text, and added a new concluding section called
“Legacy Software as History.” Here Mahoney made the argument that
history is important to computer scientists and information systems
workers because they are working with programming and languages and
operational systems that, thanks to the entrenched power of legacy sys¬
tems and dominant standards, are shaped by choices made decades ago.
His final paper concludes, “Even as computer scientists wrestle with a
solution to the problem, they must live with it. It is part of their history,

and the better they understand it, the better they will be able to move on
from it.”11
Theoretical Computer Science
Mahoney’s main project of the 1990s was a book called The Structures
of Computation: Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, 1950-
1970. It was to have explored the emergence of theoretical computer
science as a discipline, which he believed to have taken place around ef¬
forts to develop a mathematical model of the digital computer. Introduc¬
ing Mahoney at the Second ACM History of Programming Languages
Conference in 1993, programming language expert Jean Sammet stated
that this book was “nearing completion” and that he would then return
to his project on software engineering.12 But in reality progress was slow,
and by the early 2000s Mahoney was no longer confident that the book
would ever be finished. Though his Web site continued to list it as a work
in progress, he never produced a complete draft.
This was the first, and so far the only, attempt to write a reasonably
broad intellectual history of computer science. Several historians have
explored the institutional development of funding agencies and their role
in shaping work in the field.13 As for the science itself, historians and
journalists have produced little more than a small shelf of books on Alan
Turing, now a minor gay icon, and a smaller outcrop of work on John von
Neumann.14 Computer scientists have written a range of obituaries, ap¬
preciations, memoirs, historical literature surveys, histories of leading
academic programs, and narratives of work in their specialist subfields,
but the coverage provided by these is very patchy and none make a seri¬
ous attempt at the history of the discipline as a whole.15
Mahoney’s published papers on the topic broke new ground, providing
detailed and immersive glimpses of the history of theoretical computer
science. As with his work on the history of mathematics and natural sci¬
ence, his dominant concern was to reconstruct the work of leading scien¬
tists within the intellectual context in which it took place. As a result these
papers are perhaps the most compressed and demanding to be found in
the entire history of computing literature. His papers on historiography
and software were crafted with specific audiences in mind and led these
audiences expertly toward particular conclusions, easing the journey with
wit and a conversational style. In contrast, his work on theoretical com¬
puter science plunges readers into a technical world without very much in
the way of context or signposting. These papers do not explicitly frame
their argument within contexts of questions from the history of science

literature, or summarize for the reader any broader contributions to our
understanding of the evolution of science. Indeed Mahoney often seemed
to prefer his audiences to derive their own sense of precisely what his
argument was, unusual in an age where we expect a thesis to he stated
clearly at the beginning of each paper and then again at its end.
Between 1992 and 2008 Mahoney published seven papers in this area.
None is wholly distinct from the others in argument, subject matter, or evi¬
dence, yet each includes unique insights. The papers focus on the 1950s
and 1960s, with flashbacks to earlier developments in mathematics and
jumps forward to more recent developments in computer modeling and
simulation. The same names recur: Christopher Strachey, John McCarthy,
Alonzo Church, Marvin Minsky, and John von Neumann. As his short
paper “Computing and Mathematics at Princeton in the 1950s” makes
clear, for him this was, like UNIX, a local story (its conclusion was “None
of this happened in Princeton in the 1950s, but it began there.”) Read
together, they constitute a set of variations on a theme, with shared pas¬
sages and familiar refrains combined in novel ways as he experimented
with one or another framing argument or historical angle. A core set of
ideas and events appear again and again. In particular, we see the way
Mahoney relied on the exposition of lengthy quotations to structure his
work. The quotations reappear even as the exposition around them
shifts. Mahoney uses the same pair of observations from John McCarthy
on astronomy during the scientific revolution as a model for the use of
mathematics in computer science in four of his major papers on com¬
puter science. Tony Hoare’s charming admission that the mathematical
nature of programs must be asserted as “self-evident” because “nothing
is really as I have described it, neither computers nor programs nor pro¬
gramming languages nor even programmers” appears twice, as do pas¬
sages from Scott, Strachey, and several others. A passage of von Neumann,
concluding with the observation that the theory of automata must be
“from the mathematical point of view, combinatory rather than analyti¬
cal,” appears in at least six of Mahoney’s published papers and chapters.
(Only one quoted passage is comparably ubiquitous in his historiographic
work: all three of Mahoney’s major papers in this area include Henry
Ford’s description of the engineer as tinkerer).
For this volume I have aimed to strike a balance between avoiding
duplication and illuminating the development of Mahoney’s thought by
publishing three of these papers in their entirety and portions of two
more. Given their daunting density, the reader will benefit from having
more than one treatment of this story. My experience was that Ma¬
honey’s talk on the topic was much less intimidating by the third time

I heard it. Whatever difficulties he encountered in producing the book he
had planned, he could surely have published a useful volume merely by
integrating the material in these papers, providing more of the context,
and incorporating in the narrative some of the background knowledge
he assumes of the reader.
“Computer Science: The Search for a Mathematical Theory” is the most
complete statement of Mahoney’s work on the topic, outlining the for¬
merly disparate areas of knowledge (the theory of comparable functions,
theory of automata, coding theory, formal language theory, and lambda
calculus) that were combined to create the new discipline as well as briefly
sketching the process of synthesis by which this occurred. As with “Finding
a History for Software Engineering,” Mahoney is acutely conscious of the
process by which precedents were searched for and claimed. His earlier
paper “Computers and Mathematics: The Search for a Discipline of Com¬
puter Science” focuses much more on the 1960s, particularly on vital con¬
tributions of British computer scientist Christopher Strachey to the adop¬
tion of lambda calculus as “a metalanguage for specifying and analyzing
the semantics of programming language.” In these papers his primary con¬
cern is on the connections made between followers of different mathemati¬
cal traditions and the breadth of influence on the eventual shape of the
field. Well-known figures such as Turing and linguist Noam Chomsky play
their part in this narrative, but so do others such as mathematician Marcel
P. Schiitzenberger, whose contributions are much less widely appreciated
within computer science.
The use of charts in these papers to demonstrate connections and flows
of influence among people, concepts, theories, and systems was unusual in
historical practice. They function effectively to diagram the complex
structure of Mahoney’s understanding of the field’s compilation, hinting
at parts of his broader intended narrative he never fully developed. Seeing
“Shannon,” “Turing,” and “Chomsky” on the same slide with dozens of
arrows and intervening nodes makes a powerful impression, emphasizing
his interest in connections rather than detailed studies of individual topics
(see fig. 7 in chapter 12). The charts have a very similar style to the “traces”
produced in the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Project, to which Mahoney was
an (unpaid) historical consultant.16 He convinced project members that
historical influence was a complex process in which seminal work had
its impact indirectly and in combination with other streams.17 In turn he
benefited from refinements and formalization of this graphical tech¬
nique. This is an excellent example of the two-way flows of knowledge
and practice he achieved in his dealings with the technical communities of
computing.

CONNECTIONS, PRECEDENTS, AND QUESTIONS
1 4
Mahoney’s later papers drove this stream of research in an unexpected
direction, perhaps marking the divergence of his personal understanding
of the historical significance of theoretical computer science from the in¬
tended structure of his fading book project. Instead of zooming in to flesh
out the details in his story of the genesis of computer science, he pulled
back for a panoramic view in which the 1950s and 1960s were merely a
part of a broader narrative stretching back to the scientific revolution and
forward into the future of scientific practice. Mahoney’s work had long
represented the central challenge of theoretical computer science as the
production of mathematic models of the behavior of computer programs.
In “The Structures of Computation and the Mathematical Structure of
Nature” he recapitulated this story, with particular attention to cellular
'automata and lambda calculus. Again Mahoney returned to his character¬
istic themes of the quest for precedent and the post hoc assemblage of for¬
merly disparate traditions as the basis for a new discipline. This time,
however, the story is framed within the broader history of applied math¬
ematics and applied science. Mahoney explored connections between the
use of mathematical tools to model computer programs and the use of
computers to model nature, something explicit in early work in the field
(particularly that of von Neumann and Turing) and now increasingly vis¬
ible thanks to the adoption of computer models in many scientific fields
and an enthusiasm for building experimental worlds inside the machine.
This is an interesting perspective, as traditional mathematical model¬
ing, particularly the approximate solution of large systems of equations,
has drifted to the margins of computer science. Numerical analysis was a
major part of what became computer science in the 1950s and early
1960s but was largely pushed to the margins of curricula and professional
societies by the 1970s in favor of more theoretical and disciplinarily spe¬
cific topics (such as those Mahoney himself wrote about). But here Ma¬
honey argued convincingly for ties between new kinds of simulation and
modeling and computer science.
Mahoney was fascinated by the artificial life movement of the 1990s
and with the application of lambda calculus to biological models. He
twice taught a graduate seminar with Angela Creager on “Computers and
Organisms.” This paper gave him a way of integrating his work on mathe¬
matical practice during the scientific revolution with his interest in theo¬
retical computer science. Classical science had relied in large part on ge¬
ometry as a tool for modeling the natural world. The seventeenth century
saw a major upheaval as scientists such as Newton and Huygens shifted
toward what Mahoney called “an algebraic mode of thought” in which
“new means,” primarily those of calculus, “had changed not only the tech¬
niques of solution but also the very manner of posing problems.”18

Algebra allowed people to reason mathematically about the internal
behavior of the system being modeled rather than relying on geometric
analogy. Mahoney came to believe that the widespread adoption of com¬
puter simulation was reversing this historic shift. He had devoted much of
his career to exploring the initial reshaping of applied science around alge¬
bra and now saw an opportunity to explore its eventual replacement. We
have, he argued, no suitable mathematical tools with which to reason about
the internal functioning of a computer simulation or verify its correspon¬
dence with the natural system being modeled. So we are returning to a
world in which models can be evaluated only experimentally according to
their fit with observed reality. The quest of theoretical computer science to
provide a tractable mathematical description of the behavior of any given
program thus has much broader implications for the evolution of applied
science in the twenty-first century. Mahoney’s clearest statement of the idea
came in a paper not included in this volume, “Calculation—Thinking—
Computational Thinking: Seventeenth-Century Perspectives on Computa¬
tional Science.” It concluded:
Today we confront the question of whether the computer, the newest and
leading medium of scientific thought, can be comprehended mathematically,
i.e., in some way algebraically or analytically. If so, then it will be viewed as
the newest chapter of a history that began in the seventeenth century with
the beginning of algebraic thought. If not, then perhaps fifty years from now
someone will be giving a lecture on the topic of “The End of Algebraic
Thought in the Twentieth Century.”19
His paper “Software as Science—Science as Software” provides an earlier
treatment of the same materials as “The Structures of Computation,” in¬
cluding the relationship of computer science to scientific simulation. The
paper is therefore presented here as a set of extracts rather than in its
entirety. The particular framing of this version provides new insights. Ma¬
honey gives his most detailed elaboration of the concept of a disciplinary
research agenda, defined in several of his papers as what “its practitioners
agree ought to be done, a consensus concerning the problems of the field,
their order of importance or priority, the means of solving them, and
perhaps most importantly, what constitutes a solution. Becoming a rec¬
ognized practitioner means learning the agenda and then helping to carry
it out.” As he further explores the concept of an agenda, Mahoney comes
closer here than in his other versions of the story to joining the intellec¬
tual and institutional developments of computer science. Because of the
context in which the work was presented, he also included some new
material on software as a concept and the relationship of software engi¬
neering to computer science.

For many of his readers, particularly those in technical fields, the con¬
cept of a disciplinary agenda provided a new way of thinking about their
history. This perspective is clearly shaped by the work of Kuhn, who in¬
cluded these topics as part of the “paradigm” (later clarified as part of the
“disciplinary matrix” erected around the paradigm itself).20 When Ma¬
honey first presented “Software as Science—Science as Software,” I was
charged with summarizing the discussion that followed. Making a com¬
parison between their approaches, I learned from Mahoney’s reply that
Kuhn had been his primary dissertation adviser. This was a source of pride
for Mahoney. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most
broadly influential books of its era, Kuhn argued that no direct objective
comparison between major theories was possible because each constructed
a different version of the world and gives rise to a different set of concerns
and practices. His historical work on the Copernican revolution and early
development of quantum mechanics stressed the need to understand his¬
torical actors in the context of their own traditions and understandings of
the world, rather than evaluating their work according to its fidelity to our
current methods. Kuhn was a seminal advocate of the idea of science as a
social process, in which rival scientific traditions vied for supremacy and
institutional advantages such as the control of textbooks or leading re¬
search institutions were crucial in setting the direction of a field. But his
concern was purely with social dynamics among scientists themselves,
rather than with the kinds of broader social influences on scientific practice
explored in his wake by others (including, but not limited to, class, gender,
military needs, government policy, industrial developments, national styles,
and race).
Rereading these papers on theoretical computer science, I was struck
by the extent of Kuhn’s influence on Mahoney’s work. They are about
people as well as ideas, and Mahoney was interested in their intellectual
backgrounds, their institutional ties, their patterns of collaboration, and
their personal styles of science. Like Kuhn, he saw the scientific commu¬
nity, rather than the individual idea or isolated researcher, as the natural
unit of study. Also like Kuhn he was attentive to social practices within
scientific elites but not to the relations of science to broader society. This
is a striking contrast with Mahoney’s proposed agendas for the history of
computing, though of course one cannot take every worthy perspective
within a single paper or even a single career.
Kuhn’s great theme was cognitive revolution in science. He insisted
that the history found in scientific textbooks was distorted by presenting
the work of earlier scientists within present-day conceptual frameworks
and disciplinary traditions. The task of the historian was to challenge this

and reconstruct the alien subjective world in which their work actually
took place. Mahoney approached the history of computer science in a
similar way, influenced also by his own work on the scientific revolution.
He was concerned above all else with the transmission and evolution of
research agendas from one generation of scholars to the next. He wrote
as if he had in mind an audience for whom the broad outline of early
computer science, its theorists, ideas, and milestones, were already famil¬
iar. Much is alluded to rather than explained. Instead Mahoney worked
to challenge our presumed assumptions about how all these things fit to¬
gether, disrupting and rearranging a received narrative that has, alas, never
been written in the first place (though it was surely part of the folklore of
the next generation of computing researchers). This is, of course, very
much the way in which people write about early modern science, in
which men such as Newton and Galileo have been studied for centuries
and yet continue to provide material for generation after generation of
historians. It also reflects a style of teaching found in graduate history of
science seminars at Princeton, in which students are assigned substantial
mounds of historical scientific papers and other primary sources for each
week of discussion and expected to grapple for themselves with their com¬
plexities (or learn to skim, which Mahoney called “reading aggressively,”
and bluff convincingly).
His papers on the history of computer science are unmistakably chal¬
lenging. If, as I have suggested, he wrote them for an audience that does
not yet exist, then we may be unable to fully evaluate them for several de¬
cades until a conventional history of computer science, whose assumptions
Mahoney sought to challenge, has finally been assembled. I suspect that
they will retain their vitality well. In the interim, my advice is to read them
carefully and repeatedly until the pieces begin to fall into place. More than
any of Mahoney’s other work, they demonstrate the remarkable effort he
made to get inside the scientific world he was writing about and the irre¬
placeable role he filled within the history-of-computing community as our
connection to the proudest traditions of the history of science.
Summary
Mahoney’s work on the history of computing stands apart from that of
his peers in many ways. His papers are skillfully constructed and patiently
polished. Mahoney was not just the most erudite author in our field but,
sentence for sentence and paragraph for paragraph, the liveliest. His body
of work was ultimately smaller than that of other important historians of
computing, but he crammed the most ideas into each paragraph. He delved

more deeply into the intellectual content of computer science, and he took
seriously the historical efforts of its practitioners while never suppressing
his own historical instincts. He approached the subject with the instincts of
a traditional historian of science, working with a time span of centuries,
whereas most of us think in decades.
This work exemplifies three virtues above all else. The first of these is
his focus on connections: between disciplines, across historical time peri¬
ods, between theory and practice, and between traditions and schools of
thought. Mahoney never published a sustained investigation of any par¬
ticular event, person, institution, or technology related to the history of
computing, hut he was acutely aware of the structures that held them to¬
gether. These insights informed his historiographic work, particularly his
embrace of the idea of the “histories of computing(s).” The second is his
concern for precedents, not just those imposed by historians but also,
and more important, the selection of precedents by our historical actors
and their selective use to shape the subsequent development of science and
technology. The third is his commitment to identifying the big questions
others might overlook, a skill we see applied in his historiographic pa¬
pers laying out the issues in the history of computing as well as in his
own research on topics such as the relationship of computer simulation
to scientific knowledge. The questions he raised will long outlive the an¬
swers he gave, and both are outliving him. This, surely, is the ultimate
mark of success for a mature scholar entering a young field.

PART ONE
Shaping the History of Computing

CHAPTER ONE
The History of Computing in the History of Technology
ince world war ii “information” has emerged as a fundamen¬
tal scientific and technological concept applied to phenomena
ranging from black holes to DNA, from the organization of cells
to the processes of human thought, and from the management of corpo¬
rations to the allocation of global resources. In addition to reshaping es¬
tablished disciplines, it has stimulated the formation of a panoply of new
subjects and areas of inquiry concerned with its structure and its role in
nature and society. Theories based on the concept of “information” have
so permeated modern culture that it now is widely taken to characterize
our times. We live in an “information society,” an “age of information.”
Indeed, we look to models of information processing to explain our own
patterns of thought.1
The computer has played the central role in that transformation, both
accommodating and encouraging ever-broader views of “information”
and of how it can be transformed and communicated over time and space.
Since the 1950s the computer has replaced traditional methods of ac¬
counting and record keeping by a new industry of data processing. As a
primary vehicle of communication over both space and time, it has come
to form the core of modern information technology. What the English-
speaking world refers to as “computer science” is known to the rest of
Western Europe as informatique (or Informatik or informatica). Much of
the concern over information as a commodity and as a natural resource
derives from the computer and from computer-based communications
technology. Hence, the history of the computer and of computing is cen¬
tral to that of information science and technology, providing a thread by

22 SHAPING THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING
which to maintain bearing while exploring the ever-growing maze of dis¬
ciplines and subdisciplines that claim information as their subject.2
Despite the pervasive presence of computing in modern science and
technology, not to mention modern society itself, the history of comput¬
ing has yet to establish a significant presence in the history of science and
technology. Meetings of the History of Science Society and the Society
for the History of Technology in recent years have included very few ses¬
sions devoted specifically to the history of computing, and few of the the¬
matic sessions have included contributions from the perspective of com¬
puting. There is clearly a balance to be redressed here.
This status of the history of computing within the history of technology
surely reflects on both parties, but the bulk of the task of redress lies with
the former. A look at the literature shows that, by and large, historians of
computing are addressing few of the questions that historians of technology
are now asking. It is worthwhile to look at what those questions are and
what form they might take when addressed to computing. The question is
how to bring the history of computing into line with what should be its par¬
ent discipline. Doing so will follow a two-way street: the history of comput¬
ing should use models from the history of technology at the same time that
we use the history of computing to test those models. In some aspects, at
least, computing poses some of the major questions of the history of tech¬
nology in special ways. Each field has much to learn from the other.
Computings Present History
Where the current literature in the history of computing is self-consciously
historical, it focuses in large part on hardware and on the prehistory and
early development of the computer. Where it touches on later develop¬
ments or provides a wider view, it is only incidentally historical. A major
portion of the literature stems from the people involved, either through
regular surveys of the state and development of various fields and compi¬
lations of seminal papers, or through reminiscences and retrospectives,
either written directly or transcribed from their contributions to confer¬
ences and symposia. Biographies of men or machines—some heroic, some
polemical, some both—are a prominent genre, and one reads a lot about
“pioneers.” A few corporate histories have appeared, most notably IBM’s
Early Computers, but they too are in-house productions.2
This literature represents for the most part “insider” history, full of
facts and firsts. While it is firsthand and expert, it is also guided by the
current state of knowledge and bound by the professional culture. That
is, its authors take as givens (often technical givens) what a more critical,

THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY 23
outside viewer might see as choices. Reading their accounts makes it dif¬
ficult to see the alternatives, as the authors themselves lose touch with a
time when they did not know what they now know. In the long run, most
of this literature will become primary sources, if not of the development
of computing per se, then of its emerging culture.
From the outset, the computer attracted the attention of journalists, who
by the late ’50s were beginning to recount its history. The result is a sizable
inventory of accounts having the virtues and vices of the journalist’s craft.
They are vivid, they capture the spirit of the people and of the institutions
they portray, and they have an eye for the telling anecdote. But their im¬
mediacy comes at the price of perspective. Written by people more or less
knowledgeable about the subject and about the history of technology,
these accounts tend to focus on the unusual and the spectacular, be it peo¬
ple or lines of research, and they often cede to the self-evaluation of their
subjects. Thus the microcomputer and artificial intelligence have had the
lion’s share of attention, as their advocates have roared a succession of
millennia.
The journalistic accounts veer into another major portion of the litera¬
ture on computing, namely what may be called “social impact statements.”
Often difficult to distinguish from futurist musing on the computer, the
discussions of the effects of the computer on society and its various activi¬
ties tend on the whole to view computing apart from the history of tech¬
nology rather than from its perspective. History here serves the purpose of
social analysis, criticism, and commentary. Hence much of it comes from
popular accounts taken uncritically and episodically to support non-
historical, often polemical, theses. Some of this literature rests on a frankly
political agenda; whether its models and modes of analysis provide in¬
sight depends on whether one agrees with that agenda.
Finally, there is a small body of professionally historical work, dealing
for the most part with the origins of the computer, its invention and early
development. It is meant as no denigration of that work to note that it
stops at the point where computing becomes a significant presence in sci¬
ence, technology, and society. There historians stand before the daunting
complexity of a subject that has grown exponentially in size and variety,
which looks not so much like an uncharted ocean as like a trackless jun¬
gle. We pace on the edge, pondering where to cut in.4
The Questions of the History of Technology
The state of the literature in the history of computing emerges perhaps
more clearly by comparison (and by contrast) with what is currently

appearing in the history of technology in general and with the questions
that have occupied historians of technology over the past decade or so.
Those questions derive from a cluster of seminal articles by George S.
Daniels, Edwin T. Layton, Jr., Eugene S. Ferguson, Nathan Rosenberg, and
Thomas R Hughes, among others. How has the relationship between sci¬
ence and technology changed and developed over time and place? How
has engineering evolved, both as an intellectual activity and as a social
role? Is technology the creator of demand or a response to it? Put an¬
other way, does technology follow a society’s momentum or redirect it by
external impulse? How far does economics go in explaining technologi¬
cal innovation and development? How do new technologies establish
themselves in society, and how does society adapt to them? To what ex¬
tent and in what ways do societies engender new technologies? What are
the patterns by which technology is transferred from one culture to an¬
other? What role do governments play in fostering and directing techno¬
logical innovation and development? These are some of the “big ques¬
tions,” as George Daniels once put it. They can be broken down into
smaller, more manageable questions, but ultimately they are the ques¬
tions for which historians of technology bear special responsibility within
the historical community. They are all of them questions which can shed
light on the development of computing while it in turn elucidates them.5
A few examples from recent literature must suffice to suggest the ap¬
proaches historians of technology are taking to those questions. Each
suggests by implication what might be done in the history of computing.
A spate of studies on industrial research laboratories has explored the
sources, purposes, and strategies of organized innovation, invention, and
patenting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bringing out
the dynamics of technological improvement that Rosenberg suggested was
a major source of growth in productivity. In Networks ofPower Thomas P.
Hughes has provided a model for pursuing another suggestion by Rosen¬
berg, namely the need to treat technologies as interactive constituents of
systems. Developments in one subsystem may be responses to demands in
others and hence have their real payoffs there. Or a breakthrough in one
component of the system may unexpectedly create new opportunities in
the others, or even force a reorganization of the system itself.6
In detailed examinations of one of the “really big questions” of the his¬
tory of American technology, Merritt Roe Smith and David A. Hounshell
have traced the origins of the “American System” and its evolution into
mass production and the assembly line. Both have entered the workshops
and factories to reveal the quite uneven reception and progress of that
system, never so monolithic or pervasive as it seemed then or has seemed

since. Daniel Nelson and Stephen Meyer have entered the factory floor
by another door to study the effects of mass production on the workers
it organized.7
Looking at technology in other contexts, Walter McDougall has anato¬
mized the means and motivation of government support of research and
development since World War II, revealing structures and patterns that
extend well beyond the space program. Behind his study stands the on¬
going history of NASA and of its individual projects. From another per¬
spective, David F. Noble has examined the “command technology” that
lay behind the development of numerically controlled tools. At a more
mundane level, Ruth Cowan has shown how “progress is our most im¬
portant product” often translated into More Work for Mother, while her
own experiments in early nineteenth-century domestic technology have
brought out the intimate relationship between household work and fam¬
ily relations.8
In the late 1 970s Anthony F. C. Wallace and Eugene Ferguson recalled
our attention to the non-verbal modes of thought that seem more charac¬
teristic of the inventor and engineer than does the language-based think¬
ing of the scientist. Brooke Hindle’s study of Morse’s telegraph and Reese
Jenkins’s recent work on the iconic patterns of Edison’s thought provide
examples of the insights historians can derive from artifacts read as the
concrete expressions of visual and tactile cognition, recognizing that, as
Henry Ford once put it,
There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things.
It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made—and a real
mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a
mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has
any brains he will apply those ideas.9
The renewed emphasis on the visual has reinforced the natural ties be¬
tween the historian of technology and the museum, at the same time that
it has forged links between the history of technology and the study of
material culture.
The Tripartite Nature of Computing
Before trying to translate some of the above questions and models into
forms specific to the history of computing, it may help to reflect a bit on
the complexity of the object of our study. The computer is not one thing,
but many different things, and the same holds true of computing. There
is about both terms a deceptive singularity to which we fall victim when,

as is now common, we prematurely unite its multiple historical sources
into a single stream, treating Charles Babbage’s analytical engine and
George Boole’s algebra of thought as if they were conceptually related by
something other than twentieth-century hindsight. Whatever John von
Neumann’s precise role in designing the “von Neumann architecture” that
defines the computer for the period with which historians are properly con¬
cerned, it is really only in von Neumann’s collaboration with the ENIAC
team that two quite separate historical strands came together: the effort to
achieve high-speed, high-precision, automatic calculation and the effort to
design a logic machine capable of significant reasoning.10
The dual nature of the computer is reflected in its dual origins: hard¬
ware in the sequence of devices that stretches from the Pascaline to the
ENIAC, software in the series of investigations that reaches from Leibniz’s
combinatorics to Turing’s abstract machines. Until the two strands come
together in the computer, they belong to different histories, the electronic
calculator to the history of technology, the logic machine to the history of
mathematics, and they can be unfolded separately without significant loss
of fullness or texture. Though they come together in the computer, they do
not unite. The computer remains an amalgam of technological device and
mathematical concept, which retain separate identities despite their influ¬
ence on one another.11
Thus the computer in itself embodies one of the central problems of the
history of technology, namely, the relation of science and technology.12
Computing as an enterprise deepens the problem. For not only are finite
automata or denotational semantics independent of integrated circuits;
they are also linked in only the most tenuous and uncertain way to pro¬
grams and programming, that is, to software and its production. Since the
mid-1960s experience in this realm has revealed a third strand in the na¬
ture of the computer. Between the mathematics that makes the device
theoretically possible and the electronics that makes it practically feasible
lies the programming that makes it intellectually, economically, and so¬
cially useful. Unlike the extremes, the middle remains a craft, technical
rather than technological, mathematical only in appearance. It poses the
question of the relation of science and technology in a very special form.
That tripartite structure shows up in the three distinct disciplines that
are concerned with the computer: electrical engineering, computer sci¬
ence, and software engineering. Of these, the first is the most well estab¬
lished, since it predates the computer, even though its current focus on
microelectronics reflects its basic orientation toward the device. Com¬
puter science began to take shape during the 1960s, as it brought together
common concerns from mathematical logic (automata, proof theory, re-

cursive function theory), mathematical linguistics, and numerical analysis
(algorithms, computational complexity), adding to them questions of the
organization of information (data structures) and the relation of com¬
puter architecture to patterns of computation. Software engineering, con¬
ceived as a deliberately provocative term in 1967, has developed more as
a set of techniques than as a body of learning. Except for a few university
centers, such as Carnegie Mellon University, University of North Caro¬
lina, Berkeley, and Oxford, it remains primarily a concern of military and
industrial R&D aimed at the design and implementation of large, com¬
plex systems, and the driving forces are cost and reliability.13
History of Computing as History of Technology
Consider, then, the history of computing in light of current history of tech¬
nology. Several lines of inquiry seem particularly promising. Studies such
as those cited above offer a panoply of models for tracing the patterns of
growth and progress in computing as a technology. It is worth asking, for
example, whether the computing industry has moved forward more by big
advances of radical innovation or by small steps of improvement. Has it
followed the process described by Nathan Rosenberg, whereby “techno¬
logical improvement not only enters the structure of the economy through
the main entrance, as when it takes the highly visible form of major patent-
able technological breakthroughs, but that it also employs numerous and
less visible side and rear entrances where its arrival is unobtrusive, un¬
announced, unobserved, and uncelebrated”? To determine whether that is
the case will require changes in the history of computing as it is currently
practiced. It will mean looking beyond “firsts” to the revisions and modifi¬
cations that made products work and that account for their real impact.
Given the corporate, collaborative structure of modern R&D, historians of
computing must follow the admonition once made to historians of tech¬
nology to stop “substituting biography for careful analysis of social pro¬
cesses.” Without denigrating the role of heroes and pioneers, we need more
knowledge of computing’s equivalent of “shop practices, [and of] the ac¬
tivities of lower-level technicians in factories.” The question is how to pur¬
sue that inquiry across the variegated range of the emerging industry.14
Viewing computing both as a system in itself and as a component of a
variety of larger systems may provide important insights into the dynamics
of its development and may help to distinguish between its internal and its
external history. For example, it suggests an approach to the question of
the relation between hardware and software, often couched in the antago¬
nistic form of one driving the other, a form which seems to assume that the

two are relatively independent of one another. By contrast, linking them in
a system emphasizes their mutual dependence. One expects of a system
that the relationship among its internal components and their relationships
to external components will vary over time and place but that they will
do so in a way that maintains a certain equilibrium or homeostasis, even as
the system itself evolves. Seen in that light, the relation between hardware
and software is a question not so much of driving forces, or of stimulus
and response, as of constraints and degrees of freedom. While in principle
all computers have the same capacities as universal Turing machines, in
practice different architectures are conducive to different forms of com¬
puting. Certain architectures have technical thresholds (e.g., VSLI is a pre¬
requisite to massively parallel computing), others reflect conscious choices
among equally feasible alternatives; some have been influenced by the
needs and concerns of software production, others by the special pur¬
poses of customers. Early on, programming had to conform to the narrow
limits of speed and memory set by vacuum-tube circuitry. As largely exog¬
enous factors in the electronics industry made it possible to expand those
limits, and at the same time drastically lowered the cost of hardware, pro¬
gramming could take practical advantage of research into programming
languages and compilers. Researchers’ ideas of multiuser systems, interac¬
tive programming, or virtual memofy required advances in hardware at
the same time that they drew out the full power of a new generation of
machines. Just as new architectures have challenged established forms of
programming, so too theoretical advances in computation and artificial
intelligence have suggested new ways of organizing processors.'5
At present, the evolution of computing as a system and of its interfaces
with other systems of thought and action has yet to be traced. Indeed, it is
not clear how many identifiable systems constitute computing itself, given
the diverse contexts in which it has developed. We speak of the computer
industry as if it were a monolith rather than a network of interdependent
industries with separate interests and concerns. In addition to historically
more analytical studies of individual firms, both large and small, we need
analyses of their interaction and interdependence. The same holds for gov¬
ernment and academia, neither of which has spoken with one voice on mat¬
ters of computing. Of particular interest here may be the system-building
role of the computer in forging new links of interdependence among univer¬
sities, government, and industry after World War II.
Arguing in “The Big Questions” that creators of the machinery under¬
pinning the American System worked from a knowledge of the entire se¬
quence of operations in production, Daniels pointed to Peter Drucker’s
suggestion that “the organization of work be used as a unifying concept in

the history of technology.”16 The recent volume by Charles Bashe et al. on
IBM's Early Computers illustrates the potential fruitfulness of that sug¬
gestion for the history of computing. In tracing IBM’s adaptation to the
computer, they bring out the corporate tensions and adjustments intro¬
duced into IBM by the need to keep abreast of fast-breaking develop¬
ments in science and technology and in turn to share its research with
others.17 The computer reshaped R&D at IBM, defining new relations
between marketing and research, introducing a new breed of scientific
personnel with new ways of doing things, and creating new roles, in par¬
ticular that of the programmer. Whether the same holds true of, say, Bell
Laboratories or G.E. Research Laboratories, remains to be studied, as
does the structure of the R&D institutions established by the many new
firms that constituted the growing computer industry of the 1950s, 1960s,
and 1970s. Tracy Kidder’s frankly journalistic account of development at
Data General has given us a tantalizing glimpse of the patterns we may
find. Equally important will be studies of the emergence of the data-
processing shop, whether as an independent computer service or as a new
element in established institutions.18 More than one company found that
the computer reorganized de facto the lines of effective managerial power.
The computer seems an obvious place to look for insight into the ques¬
tion of whether new technologies respond to need or create it. Clearly,
the first computers responded to the felt need for high-speed, automatic
calculation, and that remained the justification for their early develop¬
ment during the late 1940s. Indeed, the numerical analysts evidently
considered the computer to be their baby and resented its adoption by
“computerologists” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But it seems equally
clear that the computer became the core of an emergent data-processing
industry more by creating demand than by responding to it. Much as
Henry Ford taught the nation how to use an automobile, IBM and its
competitors taught the nation’s businesses (and its government) how to
use the computer. How much of the technical development of the com¬
puter originated in the marketing division remains an untold story cen¬
tral to an understanding of modern technology. Kidder’s Soul of a New
Machine again offers a glimpse of what that story may reveal.19
One major factor in the creation of demand seems to have been the
alliance between the computer and the nascent field of operations research/
management science. As the pages of the Harvard Business Review for
1953 show, the computer and operations research hit the business stage
together, each a new and untried tool of management, both clothed in the
mantle of science. Against the fanciful backdrop of Croesus’ defeat by
camel-riding Persians, an IBM advertisement proclaimed that “Yester-

day . . . The Fates’ Decided. Today . . . Facts Are What Count.” Appeal¬
ing to fact-based strides in “military science, pure science, commerce, and
industry,” the advertisement pointed beyond data processing to “‘math¬
ematical models’ of specific processes, products, or situations, [by which]
man today can predetermine probable results, minimize risks and costs.
In less vivid terms, Cyril C. Herrmann of MIT and John F. Magee of Ar¬
thur D. Little introduced readers of HBR to “‘Operations Research’ for
Management,” and John Diebold proclaimed “Automation The New
Technology.” As Herbert Simon later pointed out, operations research was
both old and new, with roots going back to Charles Babbage and Freder¬
ick W. Taylor. Its novelty lay precisely in its claim to provide “mathemati¬
cal models” of business operations as a basis for rational decision making.
Depending for their sensitivity on computationally intensive algorithms
and large volumes of data, those models required the power of the
computer.20
It seems crucial for the development of the computer industry that the
business community accepted the joint claims of OR and the computer
long before either could validate them by, say, cost-benefit analysis. The
decision to adopt the new methods of “rational decision making” seems
itself to have been less than fully rational:
As business managers we are revolutionizing the procedures of our factories
and offices with automation, but what about out decision making? In other
words, isn’t there a danger that our thought processes will be left in the
horse-and-buggy stage while our operations are being run in the age of nu¬
cleonics, electronics, and jet propulsion? . . . Are the engineering and scien¬
tific symbols of our age significant indicators of a need for change?21
Even at this early stage, the computer had acquired symbolic force in the
business community and in society at large. We need to know the sources
of that force and how it worked to weave the computer into the eco¬
nomic and social fabric.22
The government has played a determining role in at least four areas of
computing: microelectronics; interactive, real-time systems; artificial in¬
telligence; and software engineering. None of these stories has been told
by a historian, although each promises deep insight into the issues raised
above. Modern weapons systems and the space program placed a pre¬
mium on miniaturization of circuits. Given the costs of research, devel¬
opment, and tooling for production, it is hard to imagine that the inte¬
grated circuit and the microprocessor would have emerged—at least as
quickly as they did—without government support. As Frank Rose put
it in Into the Heart of the Mind, “The computerization of society . .. has

essentially been a side effect of the computerization of war.” More is in¬
volved than smaller computers. Architecture and software change in re¬
sponse to speed of processor and size of memory. As a result, the rapid
pace of miniaturization tended to place already inadequate methods of
software production under the pressure of rising expectations. By the
early 1970s the Department of Defense, as the nation’s single largest pro¬
curer of software, had declared a major stake in the development of soft¬
ware engineering as a body of methods and tools for reducing the costs
and increasing the reliability of large programs.23
As Howard Rheingold has described in Tools for Thought, the govern¬
ment was quick to seize on the interest of computer scientists at MIT in
developing the computer as an enhancement and extension of human in¬
tellectual capabilities. In general, that interest coincided with the needs
of national defense in the form of interactive computing, visual displays of
both text and graphics, multiuser systems, and inter-computer networks.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency (later DARPA), soon became a
source of almost unlimited funding for research in these areas, a source that
bypassed the usual procedures of scientific funding, in particular peer re¬
view. Much of the early research in artificial intelligence derived its funding
from the same source, and its development as a field of computer science
surely reflects that independence from the agenda of the discipline as a
whole.24
Although we commonly speak of hardware and software in tandem, it is
worth noting that in a strict sense the notion of software is an artifact of
computing in the business and government sectors during the 1950s. Only
when the computer left the research laboratory and the hands of the scien¬
tists and engineers did the writing of programs become a question of pro¬
duction. It is in that light that we may most fruitfully view the development
of programming languages, programming systems, operating systems, data¬
base and file management systems, and communications and networks, all
of them aimed at facilitating the work of programmers, maintaining mana¬
gerial control over them, and assuring the reliability of their programs. The
Babel of programming languages in the 1960s tends to distract attention
from the fact that three of the most commonly used languages today are
also among the oldest: FORTRAN for scientific computing, COBOL for
data processing, and LISP for artificial intelligence. ALGOL might have re¬
mained a laboratory language had it and its offspring not become the vehi¬
cles of structured programming, a movement addressed directly to the prob¬
lems of programming as a form of production.23
Central to the history of software is the sense of “crisis” that emerged in
the late 1960s as one large project after another ran behind schedule, over

budget, and below specifications. Though pervasive throughout the indus¬
try, it posed enough of a strategic threat for the NATO Science Committee
to convene an international conference in 1968 to address it. To empha¬
size the need for a concerted effort along new lines, the committee coined
the term “software engineering,” reflecting the view that the problem re¬
quired the combination of science and management thought characteris¬
tic of engineering. Efforts to define that combination and to develop the
corresponding methods constitute much of the history of computing dur¬
ing the 1970s, at least in the realm of large systems, and it is the essential
background to the story of Ada in the 1980s. It also reveals apparently
fundamental differences between the formal, mathematical orientation of
European computer scientists and the practical, industrial focus of their
American counterparts. Historians of science and technology have seen
those differences in the past and have sought to explain them. Can histo¬
rians of computing use those explanations and in turn help to articulate
them?
The effort to give meaning to “software engineering” as a discipline and
to define a place for it in the training of computer professionals should
call the historian’s attention to the constellation of questions contained
under the heading of “discipline formation and professionalization.” In 1950
computing consisted of a handful of specially designed machines and a
handful of specially trained programmers. By 1955 some 1,000 general-
purpose computers required the services of some 10,000 programmers.
By 1960, the number of devices had increased fivefold, the number of
programmers sixfold. And so the growth continued. With it came asso¬
ciations, societies, journals, magazines, and claims to professional and
academic standing. The development of these institutions is an essential
part of the social history of computing as a technological enterprise.
Again, one may ask to what extent that development has followed his¬
torical patterns of institutionalization and to what extent it has created
its own.
The question of sources illustrates particularly well how recent work
in the history of technology may provide important guidance to the his¬
tory of computing, at the same time that the latter adds new perspectives
to that work. As noted above, historians of technology have focused new
attention on the non-verbal expressions of engineering practice. Of the
three main strands of computing, only theoretical computer science is es¬
sentially verbal in nature. Its sources come in the form most familiar to
historians of science, namely books, articles, and other less formal pieces
of writing, which by and large encompass the thinking behind them.
We know pretty well how to read them, even for what they do not say

explicitly. Similarly, at the level of institutional and social history, we
seem to be on familiar ground, suffering largely from an embarrassment
of wealth unwinnowed by time.
But the computers themselves and the programs that were written for
them constitute a quite different range of sources and thus pose the chal¬
lenge of determining how to read them. As artifacts, computers present
the problem of all electrical and electronic devices. They are machines
without moving parts. Even when they are running, they display no inter¬
nal action to explain their outward behavior. Yet, Tracy Kidder’s portrait
of Tom West sneaking a look at the boards of the new Vax to see how
DEC had gone about its work reminds us that the actual machines may
hold tales untold by manuals, technical reports, and engineering draw¬
ings. Those sources too demand our attention. When imaginatively read,
they promise to throw light not only on the designers but also on those
for whom they were designing. Through the hardware and its attendant
sources one can follow the changing physiognomy of computers as they
made their way from the laboratories and large installations to the office
and the home. Today’s prototypical computer iconically links television
to typewriter. How that form emerged from a roomful of tubes and
switches is a matter of both technical and cultural history.26
Though hard to interpret, the hardware is at least tangible. Software by
contrast is elusively intangible. In essence, it is the behavior of the ma¬
chines when running. It is what converts their architecture to action, and
it is constructed with action in mind; the programmer aims to make some¬
thing happen. What, then, captures software for the historical record?
How do we document and preserve a historically significant compiler, op¬
erating system, or database? Computer scientists have pointed to the limi¬
tations of the static program text as a basis for determining the program’s
dynamic behavior, and a provocative article has questioned how much the
written record of programming can tell us about the behavior of pro¬
grammers. Yet, Gerald M. Weinberg has given an example of how pro¬
grams may be read to reveal the machines and people behind them. In a
sense, historians of computing encounter from the opposite direction the
problem faced by the software industry: what constitutes an adequate and
reliable surrogate for an actually running program? How, in particular,
does the historian recapture, or the producer anticipate, the component
that is always missing from the static record of software, namely, the user
for whom it is written and whose behavior is an essential part of it?27
Placing the history of computing in the context of the history of tech¬
nology promises a peculiarly recursive benefit. Although computation by
machines has a long history, computing in the sense I have been using here

did not exist before the late 1940s. There were no computers, no program¬
mers, no computer scientists, no computer managers. Hence those who
invented and improved the computer, those who determined how to pro¬
gram it, those who defined its scientific foundations, those who estab¬
lished it as an industry in itself and introduced it into business and indus¬
try, all came to computing from some other background. With no inherent
precedents for their work, they had to find their own precedents. Much of
the history of computing, certainly for the first generation, but probably
also for the second and third, derives from the precedents these people
drew from their past experience. In that sense, the history of technology
shaped the history of computing, and the history of computing must turn
to the history of technology for initial bearings.
A specific example may help to illustrate the point. Daniels stated as
one of the really big questions the development of the “American Sys¬
tem” and its culmination in mass production. It is perhaps the central fact
of technology in nineteenth-century America, and every historian of the
subject must grapple with it. So too, though Daniels did not make the
point, must historians of twentieth-century technology. For mass produc¬
tion has become a historical touchstone for modern engineers, in the area
of software as well as elsewhere.28
For instance, in one of the major invited papers at the NATO Software
Engineering Conference of 1968, M. D. Mcllroy of Bell Telephone Labo¬
ratories looked forward to the end of a “preindustrial era” in program¬
ming. His metaphors and similes harked back to the machine-tool indus¬
try and its methods of production.
We undoubtedly produce software by backward techniques. We undoubt¬
edly get the short end of the stick in confrontations with hardware people
because they are the industrialists and we are the crofters. Software produc¬
tion today appears in the scale of industrialization somewhere below the
more backward construction industries. I think its proper place is consider¬
ably higher, and would like to investigate the prospects for mass-production
techniques in software.29
What Mcllroy had in mind was not replication in large numbers, which
is trivial for the computer, but rather programmed modules that might
serve as standardized, interchangeable parts to be drawn from the library
shelf and inserted in larger production programs. A quotation from Mc-
Ilroy’s paper served as leitmotif to the first part of Peter Wegner’s series
“Capital Intensive Software Technology” in the July 1984 number of IEEE
Software, which was richly illustrated by photographs of capital industry
in the 1930s and included insets on the history of technology. By then

Mcllroy’s equivalent to interchangeable parts had become “reusable soft¬
ware” and software engineers had developed more sophisticated tools
for producing it. Whether they were (or now are) any closer to the goal is
less important to the historian than the continuing strength of the model.
It reveals historical self-consciousness.30
We should appreciate that self-consciousness at the same time that we
view it critically, resisting the temptation to accept the comparisons as valid.
An activity’s choice of historical models is itself part of the history of the
activity. Mcllroy was not describing the state or even the direction of soft¬
ware in 1968. Rather, he was proposing a historical precedent on which to
base its future development. What is of interest to the historian of comput¬
ing is why Mcllroy chose the model of mass production as that precedent.
Precisely what model of mass production did he have in mind, why did he
think it appropriate or applicable to software, why did he think his audi¬
ence would respond well to the proposal, and so on? The history of tech¬
nology provides a critical context for evaluating the answers, indeed for
shaping the questions. For historians, too, the evolving techniques of mass
production in the nineteenth century constitute a model, or prototype, of
technological development. Whether it is one model or a set of closely re¬
lated models is a matter of current scholarly debate, but some features
seem clear. As a system it rested on foundations established in the early and
mid-nineteenth century, among them in particular the development of the
machine-tool industry, which, as Nathan Rosenberg has shown, itself fol¬
lowed a characteristic and revealing pattern of innovation and diffusion of
new techniques. Even with the requisite precision machinery, methods of
mass production did not transfer directly or easily from one industry to
another, and its introduction often took place in stages peculiar to the pro¬
duction process involved. Software production may prove to be the latest
variation of the model, or critical history of technology may show how it
has not fit.31
Conclusion: The Real Computer Revolution
We can take this example a step farther. From various perspectives, people
have been drawn to compare the computer to the automobile. Apple,
Atari, and others have boasted of creating the Model T of microcomput¬
ers, clearly intending to convey the image of a car in every garage, an au¬
tomobile that everyone could drive, a machine that reshaped American
life. The software engineers who invoke the image of mass production
have it inseparably linked in their minds to the automobile and its inter¬
changeable variations on a standard theme.

The two analogies serve different aims within the computer indus¬
try, the first looking to the microcomputer as an object of mass consump¬
tion, the second to software systems as objects of mass production. But they
share the vision of a society radically altered by a new technology. Be¬
neath the comparison lies the conviction that the computer is bringing
about a revolution as profound as that triggered by the automobile. The
comparison between the machines is fascinating in itself. Just how does
one weigh the PC against the PT (personal transporter)?32 For that matter,
which PC is the Model T: the Apple II, the IBM, the Atari ST, the Macin¬
tosh? Yet the question is deeper than that. What would it mean for a mi¬
crocomputer to play the role of the Model T in determining new social,
economic, and political patterns? The historical term in that comparison
is not the Model T, but Middletown, where in less than forty years “high¬
speed steel and Ford cars” had fundamentally changed the nature of work
and the lives of the workers/3 Where is the Middletown of today, simi¬
larly transformed by the presence of the microcomputer? Where would
one look? How would one identify the changes? What patterns of social
and intellectual behavior mark such transformation? In short, how does
one compare technological societies? That is one of the “big questions”
for historians of technology, and it is only in the context of the history of
technology that it will be answered for the computer.
From the very beginning, the computer has borne the label “revolution¬
ary.” Even as the first commercial machines were being delivered, commen¬
tators were extolling or fretting over the radical changes the widespread use
of computers would entail, and few doubted their use would be widespread.
The computer directed people’s eyes toward the future, and a few thou¬
sand bytes of memory seemed space enough for the solution of almost any
problem. On that both enthusiasts and critics could agree. Computing
meant unprecedented power for science, industry, and business, and with
the power came difficulties and dangers that seemed equally unprecedented.
By its nature as well as by its youth, the computer appeared to have no
history.
Yet, “revolution” is an essentially historical concept.34 Even when turn¬
ing things on their head, one can only define what is new by what is old,
and innovation, however imaginative, can only proceed from what exists.
The computer had a history out of which it emerged as a new device, and
computing took shape from other, continuing activities, each with its own
historical momentum. As the world of the computer acquired its own
form, it remained embedded in the worlds of science, technology, industry,
and business, which structured computing even as they changed in re¬
sponse to it. In doing so they linked the history of computing to their own

histories, which in turn reflected the presence of a fundamentally new
resource.
What is truly revolutionary about the computer will become clear only
when computing acquires a proper history, one that ties it to other tech¬
nologies and thus uncovers the precedents that make its innovations sig¬
nificant. Pursued within the larger enterprise of the history of technology,
the history of computing will acquire the context of place and time that
gives history meaning.

CHAPTER TWO
What Makes History?
s you look over the reviewers’ and Program Committee’s
comments on your paper, you may be perplexed by admonitions
in one form or the other to “make it more historical.” After all,
you’ve been talking about the past, you’ve got the events and people in
chronological order, you’ve related what happened. What more could be
needed to make history? The answer is hard to pin down in a series of
methodological precepts, as history is ultimately an art acquired by pro¬
fessional practice. But it may help you to understand our specific criti¬
cisms if I describe what we’re looking for in general terms.
Dick Hamming captured the essence of it in the title of his paper at the
International Conference on the History of Computing held in Los Ala¬
mos in 1976, “We Would Know What They Thought When They Did It.”1
He pleaded for a history of computing that pursued the contextual devel¬
opment of ideas, rather than merely listing names, dates, and places of
“firsts.” Moreover, he exhorted historians to go beyond the documents to
“informed speculation” about the results of undocumented practice.
What people actually did and what they thought they were doing may
well not be accurately reflected in what they wrote and what they said
they were thinking. His own experience had taught him that.
Getting behind the documentation to discover what people were think¬
ing is no easy task, even when the people are still available to ask or when
they themselves are doing the history. A story, perhaps apocryphal, about
Jean Piaget shows why. The psychologist was standing outside one evening
with a group of eleven-year-olds and called their attention to the newly
risen moon, pointing out that it was appreciably higher in the sky than it

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Ashlydyat: I speak of them. Make them comfortable. Most of them
are already in years: take care of them when they shall be too old to
work.”
“Oh, I’ll do that,” said George. “I expect Janet——”
George’s words died away. They had rounded the ash-trees, and
were fronting the Dark Plain. White enough looked the plain that
night; but dark was the Shadow on it. Yes, it was there! The dark,
portentous, terrific Shadow of Ashlydyat!
They stood still. Perhaps their hearts stood still. Who can know? A
man would rather confess to an unholy deed, than acknowledge his
belief in a ghostly superstition.
“How dark it is to-night!” broke from George.
In truth, it had never been darker, never more intensely distinct.
If, as the popular belief went, the evil to overtake the Godolphins
was foreshadowed to be greater or less, according to the darker or
lighter hue of the Shadow, then never did such ill fall on the
Godolphins, as was to fall now.
“It is black, not dark,” replied Thomas, in answer to George’s
remark. “I never saw it so black as it is now. Last night it was
comparatively light.”
George turned his gaze quickly upwards to the moon, searching in
the aspect of that luminary a solution to the darker shade of to-
night. “There’s no difference!” he cried aloud. “The moon was as
bright as this, last night, but not brighter. I don’t think it could be
brighter. You say the Shadow was there last night, Thomas?”
“Yes. But not so dark as now.”
“But, Thomas! you were ill last night; you could not see it.”
“I came as far as the turnstile here with Lord Averil. He called at
Ashlydyat after leaving Lady Godolphin’s Folly. I was better then, and
strolled out of the house with him.”
“Did he see the Shadow?”
“I don’t know. It was there; but not very distinct. He did not
appear to see it. We were passing quickly, and talking about my

illness.”
“Did you give Averil any hint of what your illness may be?” asked
George hastily.
“Not an indication of it. Janet, Snow, and you, are my only
confidants as yet. Bexley is partially so. Were that Shadow to be
seen by Prior’s Ash, and the fact of my illness transpired, people
would say that it was a forewarning of my end,” he continued, with a
grave smile, as he and George turned to pursue their road to
Ashlydyat.
They reached the porch in silence. George shook hands with his
brother. “Don’t attempt to come to business to-morrow,” he said. “I
will come up in the evening, and see you.”
“Won’t you come in now, George?”
“Not now. Good night, Thomas. I heartily wish you better.”
George turned and retraced his steps, past the ash-trees, past the
Dark Plain. Intensely black the Shadow certainly looked: darker even
than when he had passed it just before—at least so it appeared to
George’s eyes. He halted a moment, quite struck with the sombre
hue. “Thomas said it appeared light last night,” he half muttered:
“and for him death cannot be much of an evil. Superstitious Janet,
daft Margery, would both say that the evil affects me: that I am to
bring it!” he added, with a smile of mockery at the words. “Angry
enough it certainly looks!”
It did look angry. But George vouchsafed it no further attention.
He had too much on his mind to give heed to shadows, even though
it were the ominous Shadow of Ashlydyat. George, as he had said to
Charlotte Pain, was very nearly at his wits’ end. One of his minor
perplexities was, how he should get to London. He had urgent
necessity for proceeding in search of Mr. Verrall, and equally urgent
was it that the expedition should be kept from Thomas Godolphin.
What excuse could he invent for his absence?
Rapidly arranging his plans, he proceeded again to the Bell Inn,
held a few minutes’ confidential conversation with Captain St.
Aubyn, waking that gentleman out of his first sleep for it—not that

he by any means enlightened him as to any trouble that might be
running riot in his brain—and then went home. Maria came forward
to meet him.
“How is poor Captain St. Aubyn, George? Very ill?”
“Very. How did you know anything about it, Maria?”
“Thomas told me you had been sent for. Thomas came to my
sitting-room before he left, after the rest had gone. You have stayed
a good while with him.”
“Ay. What should you say if I were to go back and stop the night
with him?” asked George, half jokingly.
“Is he so ill as that?”
“And also to accompany him a stage or two on his journey to-
morrow morning? He starts at six, and is about as fit to travel as an
invalid just out of bed after a month’s illness.”
“Do you really mean that you are going to do all that, George?”
she inquired, in surprise.
George nodded. “I do not fancy Thomas will be here to-morrow,
Maria. Ask to speak to Isaac when he comes in the morning. Tell him
that I shall be home some time in the afternoon, but I have gone
out of town a few miles with a sick friend. He can say so if I am
particularly inquired for.”
George went to his room. Maria followed him. He was changing
his coat and waistcoat, and threw an overcoat upon his arm. Then
he looked at his watch.
“What is the time?” asked Maria.
“Twenty minutes past eleven. Good night, my darling.”
She fondly held his face down to hers while he kissed her, giving
him—as George had once saucily told her she would—kiss for kiss.
There was no shame in it now; only love. “Oh, George, my dearest,
mind you come back safe and well to me!” she murmured, tears
filling her eyes.
“Don’t I always come back safe and well to you, you foolish child?
Take care of yourself, Maria.”

Maria’s hand rested lingeringly in his. Could she have divined that
Mr. George’s tender adieux sometimes strayed elsewhere!—that his
confidences were given, but not to her! George went out, and the
hall door closed upon him.
It was well Maria did not watch him away! Well for her
astonishment. Instead of going to the Bell Inn, he turned short
round to the left, and took the by-way which led to the railway
station, gaining it in time to catch the express train, which passed
through Prior’s Ash at midnight for London.

CHAPTER VI.
MR. VERRALL’S CHAMBERS.
In thoroughly handsome chambers towards the west-end of
London, fitted up with costly elegance, more in accordance (one
would think) with a place consecrated to the refinements of life, than
to business, there sat one morning a dark gentleman, of staid and
respectable appearance. To look at his clean, smoothly shaven face,
his grey hair, his gold-rimmed spectacles, his appearance altogether,
every item of which carried respectability with it, you might have
trusted the man at a first glance. In point of fact, he was got up to
be trusted. A fire was pleasant on those spring mornings, and a
large and clear one flamed in the burnished grate. Miniature statues,
and other articles possessing, one must suppose, some rare
excellence, gave to the room a refined look; and the venerable
gentleman (venerable in sober respectability, you must understand,
more than from age, for his years were barely fifty) sat enjoying its
blaze, and culling choice morsels from the Times. The money article,
the price of stock, a large insolvency case, and other news especially
acceptable to men of business, were being eagerly read by him.
An architect might have taken a model of these chambers, so
artistically were they arranged. A client could pass into any one of
the three rooms, and not come out by the same door; he might
reach them by the wide, handsome staircase, descend by means of
a ladder, and emerge in a back street. Not absolutely a ladder, but a
staircase so narrow as almost to deserve the name. It did happen,
once in a way, that a gentleman might prefer that means of exit,
even if he did not of entrance. These chambers were, not to keep

you longer in suspense, the offices of the great bill-discounting firm,
Trueworthy and Co.
One peculiar feature in their internal economy was, that no client
ever got to see Mr. Trueworthy. He was too great a man to stoop to
business in his own proper person. He was taking his pleasure in the
East; or he was on a visit to some foreign court, the especial guest
of its imperial head; or sojourning with his bosom friend the Duke of
Dorsetshire at his shooting-box; or reposing at his own country seat;
or ill in bed with gout. From one or other of these contingencies Mr.
Trueworthy was invariably invisible. It happened now and then that
there was a disturbance in these elegant chambers, caused by some
ill-bred and ill-advised gentleman, who persisted in saying that he
had been hardly treated—in point of fact, ruined. One or two had,
on these occasions, broadly asserted their conviction that there was
no Mr. Trueworthy at all: but of course their ravings, whether on the
score of their own wrongs, or on the non-existence of that estimable
gentleman, whose fashionable movements might have filled a
weekly column of the Court Circular, were taken for what they were
worth.
In the years gone by—only a very few years, though—the firm had
owned another head: at any rate, another name. A young, fair man,
who had disdained the exclusiveness adopted by his successor, and
deemed himself not too great a mortal to be seen of men. This
unfortunate principal had managed his affairs badly. In some way or
other he came to grief. Perhaps the blame lay in his youth. Some
one was so wicked as to prefer against him a charge of swindling;
and ill-natured tongues said it would go hard with him—fifteen years
at least. What they meant by the last phrase, they best knew. Like
many another charge, it never came to anything. The very hour
before he would have been captured, he made his escape, and had
never since been seen or heard of. Some surmised that he was
dead, some that he was in hiding abroad: only one thing was certain
—that into this country he could not again enter.
All that, however, was past and gone. The gentleman, Mr.
Brompton, sitting at his ease over his newspaper, his legs stretched

out to the blaze, was the confidential manager and head of the
office. Half the applicants did not know but that he was its principal:
strangers, at first, invariably believed that he was so. A lesser
satellite, a clerk, or whatever he might be, sat in an outer room, and
bowed in the clients, his bow showing far more deference to this
gentleman than to the clients themselves. How could the uninitiated
suppose that he was anything less than the principal?
On this morning there went up the broad staircase a gentleman
whose remarkably good looks drew the eyes of the passers-by
towards him, as he got out of the cab which brought him. The clerk
took a hasty step forward to arrest his progress, for the gentleman
was crossing the office with a bold step: and all steps might not be
admitted to that inner room. The gentleman, however, put up his
hand, as if to say, Don’t you know me? and went on. The clerk, who
at the first moment had probably not had time to recognize him,
threw open the inner door.
“Mr. George Godolphin, sir.”
Mr. George Godolphin strode on. He was evidently not on familiar
terms with the gentleman who rose to receive him, for he did not
shake hands with him. His tone and manner were courteous.
“Is Mr. Verrall here?”
“He is not here, Mr. Godolphin. I am not sure that he will be here
to-day.”
“I must see him,” said George, firmly. “I have followed him to
town to see him. You know that he came up yesterday?”
“Yes. I met him last night.”
“I should suppose, as he was sent for unexpectedly—which I hear
was the case—that he was sent for on business; and therefore that
he would be here to-day,” pursued George.
“I am not sure of it. He left it an open question.”
George looked uncommonly perplexed. “I must see him, and I
must be back at Prior’s Ash during business hours to-day. I must
catch the eleven down-train if possible.”

“Can I do for you as well as Mr. Verrall?” asked Mr. Brompton,
after a pause.
“No, you can’t. Verrall I must see. It is very strange that you don’t
know whether he is to be here or not.”
“It happens to-day that I do not know. Mr. Verrall left it last night,
I say, an open question.”
“It is the loss of time that I am thinking of,” returned George. “You
see if I go down now to his residence, he may have left it to come
up here; and we should just miss each other.”
“Very true,” asserted Brompton.
George stood for a moment in thought, and then turned on his
heel, and departed. “Do you know whether Mr. Verrall will be up this
morning?” he asked of the clerk, as he passed through the outer
room.
The clerk shook his head. “I am unable to say, sir.”
George went down to the cab, and entered it. “Where to, sir?”
asked the driver, as he closed the door.
“The South-Western Railway.”
As the echo of George’s footsteps died away on the stairs, Mr.
Brompton, first slipping the bolt of the door which led into the clerk’s
room, opened the door of another room. A double door, thoroughly
well padded, deadened all sound between the apartments. It was a
larger and more luxurious room still. Two gentlemen were seated in
it by a similarly bright fire: though, to look at the face of the one—a
young man, whose handkerchief, as it lay carelessly on the table
beside him, bore a viscount’s coronet—no one would have thought
any fire was needed. His face was glowing, and he was talking in
angry excitement, but with a tone and manner somewhat subdued,
as if he were in the presence of a master, and dared not put forth
his metal. In short, he looked something like a caged lion. Opposite
to him, listening with cold, imperturbable courtesy, his face utterly
impassive, as it ever was, his eyes calm, his yellow hair in perfect
order, his moustache trimmed, his elbows resting on the arms of his
chair, and the tips of his fingers meeting, on one of which fingers

shone a monster diamond of the purest water, was Mr. Verrall. Early
as the hour was, glasses and champagne stood on the table.
Mr. Brompton telegraphed a sign to Mr. Verrall, and he came out,
leaving the viscount to waste his anger upon air. The viscount might
rely on one thing: that it was just as good to bestow it upon air as
upon Mr. Verrall, for all the impression it would make on the latter.
“Godolphin has been here,” said Mr. Brompton, keeping the doors
carefully closed.
“He has followed me to town, then! I thought he might do so. It is
of no use my seeing him. If he won’t go deeper into the mire, why,
the explosion must come.”
“He must go deeper into it,” remarked Mr. Brompton.
“He holds out against it, and words seem wasted on him. Where’s
he gone now?”
“Down to your house, I expect. He says he must be back home to-
day, but must see you first. I thought you would not care to meet
him, so I said I didn’t know whether you’d be here or not.”
Mr. Verrall mused. “Yes, I’ll see him. I can’t deal with him
altogether as I do with others. And he has been a lucky card to us.”
Mr. Verrall went back to his viscount, who by that time was
striding explosively up and down the room. Mr. Brompton sat down
to his paper again, and his interesting news of the Insolvency Court.
In one of the most charming villas on the banks of the Thames, a
villa which literally lacked nothing that money could buy, sat Mrs.
Verrall at a late breakfast, on that same morning. She jumped up
with a little scream at the sight of George Godolphin crossing the
velvet lawn.
“What bad news have you come to tell me? Is Charlotte killed? Or
is Lady Godolphin’s Folly on fire?”
“Charlotte was well when I left her, and the Folly standing,” replied
George, throwing care momentarily to the winds, as he was sure to
do in the presence of a pretty woman.

“She will be killed, you know, some day with those horses of hers,”
rejoined Mrs. Verrall. “What have you come for, then, at this
unexpected hour? When Verrall arrived last night, he said you were
giving a dinner at Prior’s Ash.”
“I want to see Verrall. Is he up yet?”
“Up! He was up and away ages before I awoke. He went up early
to the office.”
George paused. “I have been to the office, and Mr. Brompton said
he did not know whether he would be there to-day at all.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know,” returned Mrs. Verrall, believing she might
have made an inconvenient admission. “When he goes up to town, I
assume he goes to the office; but he may be bound to the wilds of
Siberia for anything I can tell.”
“When do you expect him home?” asked George.
“I did not ask him,” carelessly replied Mrs. Verrall. “It may be to-
day, or it may be next month. What will you take for breakfast?”
“I will not take anything,” returned George, holding out his hand
to depart.
“But you are not going again in this hasty manner! What sort of a
visit do you call this?”
“A hasty one,” replied George. “I must be at Prior’s Ash this
afternoon. Any message to Charlotte?”
“Why—yes—I have,” said Mrs. Verrall, with some emphasis. “I was
about to despatch a small parcel this very next hour to Charlotte, by
post. But—when shall you see her? To-night?”
“I can see her to-night if you wish it.”
“It would oblige me much. The truth is, it is something I ought to
have sent yesterday, and I forgot it. Be sure and let her have it to-
night.”
Mrs. Verrall rang, and a small packet, no larger than a bulky letter,
was brought in. George took it, and was soon being whirled back to
London.

He stepped into a cab at the Waterloo Station, telling the man he
should have double pay if he drove at double speed: and it conveyed
him to Mr. Verrall’s chambers.
George went straight to Mr. Brompton’s room, as before. That
gentleman had finished his Times, and was buried deep in a pile of
letters. “Is Mr. Verrall in now?” asked George.
“He is here now, Mr. Godolphin. He was here two minutes after
you departed: it’s a wonder you did not meet.”
George knew the way to Mr. Verrall’s room, and was allowed to
enter. Mr. Verrall, alone then, turned round with a cordial grasp.
“Holloa!” said he. “We somehow missed this morning. How are
you?”
“I say, Verrall, how came you to play me such a trick as to go off
in that clandestine manner yesterday?” remonstrated George. “You
know the uncertainty I was in: that if I did not get what I hoped for,
I should be on my beam ends?”
“My dear fellow, I supposed you had got it. Hearing nothing of you
all day, I concluded it had come by the morning’s post.”
“It had not come then,” returned George, crustily. In spite of his
blind trust in the unbleached good faith of Mr. Verrall, there were
moments when a thought would cross him as to whether that
gentleman had been playing a double game. This was one of them.
“I had a hasty summons, and was obliged to come away without
delay,” explained Mr. Verrall. “I sent you a message.”
“Which I never received,” retorted George. “But the message is
not the question. See here! A pretty letter, this, for a man to read. It
came by the afternoon post.”
Mr. Verrall took the letter, and digested the contents deliberately;
in all probability he had known their substance before. “What do you
think of it?” demanded George.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Mr. Verrall.
“It’s ruin,” returned George.
“Unless averted. But it must be averted.”

“How?”
“There is one way, you know,” said Mr. Verrall, after a pause. “I
have pointed it out to you already.”
“And I wish your tongue had been blistered, Verrall, before you
ever had pointed it out to me!” foamed George. “There!”
Mr. Verrall raised his impassive eyebrows. “You must be aware
——”
“Man!” interrupted George, his voice hoarse with emotion, as he
grasped Mr. Verrall’s shoulder: “do you know that the temptation,
since you suggested it, is ever standing out before me—an ignis
fatuus, beckoning me on to it! Though I know that it would prove
nothing but a curse to engulf me.”
“Here, George, take this,” said Mr. Verrall, pouring out a large
tumbler of sparkling wine, and forcing it upon him. “The worst of
you is, that you get so excited over things! and then you are sure to
look at them in a wrong light. Just hear me for a moment. The
pressure is all at this present moment, is it not? If you can lift it, you
will recover yourself fast enough. Has it ever struck you,” Mr. Verrall
added, somewhat abruptly, “that your brother is fading?”
Remembering the scene with his brother the previous night,
George looked very conscious. He simply nodded an answer.
“With Ashlydyat yours, you would recover yourself almost
immediately. There would positively be no risk.”
“No risk!” repeated George, with emphasis.
“I cannot see that there would be any. Everything’s a risk, if you
come to that. We are in risk of earthquakes, of a national
bankruptcy, of various other calamities: but the risk that would
attend the step I suggested to you is really so slight as not to be
called a risk. It never can be known: the chances are a hundred
thousand to one.”
“But there remains the one,” persisted George.
“To let an exposé come would be an act of madness, at the worst
look out: but it is madness and double madness when you may so

soon succeed to Ashlydyat.”
“Oblige me by not counting upon that, Verrall,” said George. “I
hope, ill as my brother appears to be, that he may live yet.”
“I don’t wish to count upon it,” returned Mr. Verrall. “It is for you
to count upon it, not me. Were I in your place, I should not blind my
eyes to the palpable fact. Look here: your object is to get out of this
mess?”
“You know it is,” said George.
“Very well. I see but one way for you to do it. The money must be
raised, and how is that to be done? Why, by the means I suggest. It
will never be known. A little time, and things can be worked round
again.”
“I have been hoping to work things round this long while,” said
George. “And they grow worse instead of better.”
“Therefore I say that you should not close your eyes to the
prospect of Ashlydyat. Sit down. Be yourself again, and let us talk
things over quietly.”
“You see, Verrall, the risk falls wholly upon me.”
“And, upon whom the benefit, for which the risk will be incurred?”
pointedly returned Mr. Verrall.
“It seems to me that I don’t get the lion’s share of these benefits,”
was George’s remark.
“Sit down, I say. Can’t you be still? Here, take some more wine.
There: now let us talk it over.”
And talk it over they did, as may be inferred. For it was a full hour
afterwards when George came out. He leaped into the cab, which
had waited, telling the man that he must drive as if he were going
through fire and water. The man did so: and George arrived at the
Paddington station just in time to lose his train.

CHAPTER VII.
BEYOND RECALL.
The clerks were at a stand-still in the banking-house of Godolphin,
Crosse, and Godolphin. A certain iron safe had to be opened, and
the key was not to be found. There were duplicate keys to it; one of
them was kept by Mr. Godolphin, the other by Mr. George. Mr. Hurde,
the cashier, appealed to Isaac Hastings.
“Do you think it has not been left with Mrs. George Godolphin?”
“I’ll ask her,” replied Isaac, getting off his stool. “I don’t think it
has: or she would have given it to me when she informed me of Mr.
George Godolphin’s absence.”
He went into the dining-room: that pleasant room, which it was
almost a shame to designate by the name. Maria was listlessly
standing against the window-frame, plucking mechanically the fading
blossoms of a geranium. She turned her head at the opening of the
door, and saw her brother.
“Isaac, what time does the first train come in?”
“From what place?” inquired Isaac.
“Oh—from the Portsmouth direction. It was Portsmouth that
Captain St. Aubyn was to embark from, was it not?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” replied Isaac. “Neither can I tell
at what hours trains arrive from that direction. Maria, has Mr. George
Godolphin left the key of the book-safe with you?”
“No,” was Maria’s answer. “I suppose he must have forgotten to do
so. He has left it with me when he has gone away unexpectedly
before, after banking-hours.”

Isaac returned to the rest of the clerks. The key was wanted
badly, and it was decided that he should go up to Ashlydyat for Mr.
Godolphin’s.
He took the nearest road to it. Down Crosse Street, and through
the Ash-tree Walk. It was a place, as you have heard, especially
shunned at night: it was not much frequented by day. Therefore, it
was no surprise to Isaac Hastings that he did not, all through it,
meet a single thing, either man or ghost. At the very end, however,
on that same broken bench where Thomas Godolphin and his bodily
agony had come to an anchor the previous night, sat Charlotte Pain.
She was in deep thought: deep perplexity; there was no mistaking
that her countenance betrayed both: some might have fancied in
deep pain, either bodily or mental. Pale she was not. Charlotte’s
complexion was made up too fashionably for either red or white,
born of emotion, to affect it, unless it might be emotion of a most
extraordinary nature. Hands clenched, brow knit, lips drawn from her
teeth, eyes staring on vacancy—Isaac Hastings could not avoid
reading the signs, and he read them with surprise.
“Good morning, Mrs. Pain!”
Charlotte started from the seat with a half scream. “What’s the
use of startling one like that!” she fiercely exclaimed.
“I did not startle you intentionally,” replied Isaac. “You might have
heard my footsteps had you not been so preoccupied. Did you think
it was the ghost arriving?” he added, jestingly.
“Of course I did,” returned Charlotte, laughing, as she made an
effort, and a successful one, to recover herself. “What do you do
here this morning? Did you come to look after the ghost, or after
me?”
“After neither,” replied Isaac, with more truth than gallantry. “Mr.
George Godolphin has sent me up here.”
Now, in saying this, what Isaac meant to express was nothing
more than that his coming up was caused by George Godolphin.
Alluding of course to George’s forgetfulness in carrying off the key.
Charlotte, however, took the words literally, and her eyes opened.

“Did George Godolphin not go last night?”
“Yes, he went. He forgot——”
“Then what can have brought him back so soon?” was her
vehement interruption, not allowing Isaac time to conclude. “There’s
no day train in from London yet.”
“Is there not?” was Isaac’s rejoinder, looking keenly at her.
“Why, of course there’s not: as you know, or ought to know.
Besides, he could not get through the business he has gone upon
and be back yet, unless he came by telegraph. He intended to leave
by the eleven o’clock train from Paddington.”
She spoke rapidly, thoughtlessly, in her surprise. Her inward
thought was, that to have gone to London, and returned again since
the hour at which she parted from him the previous night, one way,
at least, must have been accomplished on the telegraph wires. Had
she taken a moment for reflection, she would not have so spoken.
However familiar she might be with the affairs of Mr. George
Godolphin, so much the more reason was there for her shunning
open allusion to them.
“Who told you Mr. George Godolphin had gone to London, Mrs.
Pain?” asked Isaac, after a pause.
“Do you think I did not know it? Better than you, Mr. Isaac, clever
and wise as you deem yourself.”
“I pretend to be neither one nor the other with regard to the
movements of Mr. George Godolphin,” was the reply of Isaac. “It is
not my place to be so. I heard he had only gone a stage or two
towards Portsmouth with a sick friend. Of course if you know he has
gone to London, that is a different matter. I can’t stay now, Mrs.
Pain: I have a message for Mr. Godolphin.”
“Then he is not back again?” cried Charlotte, as Isaac was going
through the turnstile.
“Not yet.”
Charlotte looked after him as he went out of sight, and bit her lips.
A doubt was flashing over her—called up by Isaac’s last observation

—as to whether she had done right to allude to London. When
George had been with her, discussing it, he had wondered what
excuse he should invent for taking the journey, and Charlotte never
supposed but that it would be known. The bright idea of starting on
a benevolent excursion towards Portsmouth, had been an after-
thought of Mr. George’s as he journeyed home.
“If I have done mischief,” Charlotte was beginning slowly to
murmur. But she threw back her head defiantly. “Oh, nonsense
about mischief! What does it matter? George can battle it out.”
Thomas Godolphin was at breakfast in his own room, his face,
pale and worn, bearing traces of suffering. Isaac Hastings was
admitted, and explained the cause of his appearance. Thomas
received the news of George’s absence with considerable surprise.
“He left me late last night—in the night, I may say—to return
home. He said nothing then of his intention to be absent. Where do
you say he has gone to?”
“Maria delivered a message to me, sir, from him, to the effect that
he had accompanied a sick friend, Captain St. Aubyn, a few miles on
the Portsmouth line,” replied Isaac. “But Mrs. Pain, whom I have just
met, says it is to London that he has gone: she says she knows it.”
Thomas Godolphin made no further comment. It may not have
pleased him to remark upon any information touching his brother
furnished by Mrs. Charlotte Pain. He handed the key to Isaac, and
said he should speedily follow him to the Bank. It had not been
Thomas Godolphin’s intention to go to the Bank that day, but
hearing of George’s absence caused him to proceed thither. He
ordered his carriage, and got there almost as soon as Isaac, bearing
an invitation to Maria from Janet.
A quarter of an hour given to business in the manager’s room,
George’s, and then Thomas Godolphin went to Maria. She was
seated now near the window, in her pretty morning dress, engaged
in some sort of fancy work. In her gentle face, her soft sweet eyes,
Thomas would sometimes fancy he read a resemblance to his lost
Ethel. Thomas greatly loved and esteemed Maria.

She rose to receive him, holding out her hand that he might take
it as she quietly but earnestly made inquiries about his state of
health. Not so well as he was yesterday, Thomas answered. He
supposed George had given her the account of their meeting the
previous night, under the ash-trees, and of his, Thomas’s illness.
Maria had not heard it. “How could George have been near the
ash-trees last night?” she, wondering, inquired. “Do you mean last
night, Thomas?”
“Yes, last night, after I left you. I was taken ill in going home——”
Miss Meta, who had been fluttering about the terrace, fluttered in
to see who might be talking to her mamma, and interrupted the
conclusion of the sentence. “Uncle Thomas! Uncle Thomas!” cried
she, joyously. They were great friends.
Her entrance diverted the channel of their conversation. Thomas
took the child on his knee, fondly stroking her golden curls. Thomas
remembered to have stroked just such golden curls on the head of
his brother George, when he, George, was a little fellow of Meta’s
age.
“Janet bade me ask if you would go to Ashlydyat for the day,
Maria,” said he. “She——”
“Meta go too,” put in the little quick tongue. “Meta go too, Uncle
Thomas.”
“Will Meta be good?—and not run away from Aunt Janet, and lose
herself in the passages, as she did last time?” said Thomas, with a
smile.
“Meta very good,” was the answer, given with an oracular nod of
promise. Thomas turned to Maria.
“Where is it that George has gone?” he asked. “With St. Aubyn? or
to London?”
“Not to London,” replied Maria. “He has gone with Captain St.
Aubyn. What made you think of London?”
“Isaac said Mrs. Pain thought he had gone to London,” replied
Thomas. “It was some mistake, I suppose. But I wonder he should

go out to-day for anything less urgent than necessity. The Bank
wants him.”
Maria was soon to be convinced that she need not have spoken so
surely about George’s having gone with Captain St. Aubyn. When
she and Meta, with Margery—who would have thought herself
grievously wronged had she not been one of the party to Ashlydyat
—were starting, Thomas came out of the Bank parlour and
accompanied them to the door. While standing there, the porter of
the Bell Inn happened to pass, and Maria stopped him to inquire
whether Captain St. Aubyn was better when he left.
“He was not at all well, ma’am,” was the man’s answer: “hardly fit
to travel. He had been in a sort of fever all the night.”
“And my master, I suppose, must take and sit up with him!” put in
Margery, without ceremony, in a resentful tone.
“No, he didn’t,” said the man, looking at Margery, as if he did not
understand her. “It was my turn to be up last night, and I was in and
out of his room four or five times: but nobody stayed with him.”
“But Mr. George Godolphin went with Captain St. Aubyn this
morning?” said Thomas Godolphin to the man.
“Went where, sir?”
“Started with him. On his journey.”
“No, sir; not that I know of. I did not see him at the station.”
Maria thought the man must be stupid. “Mr. George Godolphin
returned to the Bell between eleven and twelve last night,” she
explained. “And he intended to accompany Captain St. Aubyn this
morning on his journey.”
“Mr. George was at the Bell for a few minutes just after eleven,
ma’am. It was me that let him out. He did not come back again. And
I don’t think he was at the train this morning. I am sure he was not
with Captain St. Aubyn, for I never left the captain till the train
started.”
Nothing further was said to the porter. He touched his hat, and
went his way. Maria’s face wore an air of bewilderment. Thomas

smiled at her.
“I think it is you who must be mistaken, Maria,” said he. “Depend
upon it, Mrs. Pain is right: he has gone to London.”
“But why should he go to London without telling me?” debated
Maria. “Why say he was going with Captain St. Aubyn?”
Thomas could offer no opinion upon the subject. Miss Meta began
to stamp her pretty shoes, and to drag her mamma by the hand.
She was impatient to depart.
They chose the way by the lonely Ash-tree Walk. It was pleasant
on a sunny day: sunshine scares away ghosts: and it was also the
nearest. As they were turning into it, they met Charlotte Pain. Maria,
simple-hearted and straightforward, never casting a suspicion to—to
anything undesirable—spoke at once of the uncertainty she was in,
as to her husband.
“Why do you think he has gone to London?” she asked.
“I know he has,” replied Charlotte. “He told me he was going
there.”
“But he told me he was only going with Captain St. Aubyn,”
returned Maria, a doubtful sound in her voice.
“Oh, my dear, gentlemen do not find it always convenient to keep
their wives au courant of their little affairs.”
Had it been salvation to her, Charlotte could not have helped
launching that shaft at Maria Godolphin. No; not even regard for
George’s secrets stopped her. She had done the mischief by
speaking to Isaac, and this opportunity was too glorious to be
missed, so she braved it out. Had Charlotte dared—for her own sake
—she could have sent forth an unlimited number of poisoned arrows
daily at George Godolphin’s wife: and she would have relished the
sport amazingly. She sailed off: a curiously conspicuous smile of
triumph in her eyes as they were bent on Maria, her parting
movement being a graciously condescending nod to the child.
Maria was recalled to her senses by Margery. The woman was
gazing after Charlotte with a dark, strange look: a look that Maria

understood as little as she understood Charlotte’s triumphant one.
Margery caught the eye of her mistress upon her, and smoothed her
face with a short cough.
“I’m just taking the pattern of her jacket, ma’am. It matches so
bravely with the hat. I wonder what the world will come to next?
The men will take to women’s clothes, I suppose, now the women
have taken to men’s.”
Mr. George—as you may remember—missed his train. And Mr.
George debated whether he should order a special. Two reasons
withheld him. One was, that his arriving at Prior’s Ash by a special
train might excite comment; the other, that a special train was
expensive; and of late Mr. George Godolphin had not had any too
much ready money to spare. He waited for the next ordinary train,
and that deposited him at Prior’s Ash at seven o’clock.
He proceeded home at once. The Bank was closed for the
evening. Pierce admitted his master, who went into the dining-room.
No sign of dinner; no signs of occupation.
“My mistress is at Ashlydyat, sir. She went up this morning with
Miss Meta and Margery. You would like dinner, sir, would you not?”
“I don’t much care for it,” responded George. “Anything will do.
Has Mr. Godolphin been at the Bank to-day?”
“Yes, sir. He has been here all day, I think?”
George went into the Bank parlour, then to other of the business
rooms. He was looking about for letters: he was looking at books:
altogether he seemed to be busy. Presently he came out and called
Pierce.
“I want a light.”
Pierce brought it. “I shall be engaged here for half an hour,” said
his master. “Should any one call, I cannot be disturbed: under any
pretence, you understand.”
“Very well, sir,” replied Pierce, as he withdrew. And George locked
the intervening door between the house and the Bank, and took out
the key.

He turned into a passage and went diving down a few stairs, the
light in his hand; selected one of several keys which he had brought
with him, and opened the door of a dry-vaulted room. It was the
strong-room of the Bank, secure and fireproof.
“Safe number three, on right,” he read, consulting a bit of paper
on which he had copied down the words in pencil upstairs. “Number
three? Then it must be this one.”
Taking another of the keys, he put it into the lock. Turned it, and
turned it, and—could not open the lock. George snatched it out, and
read the label. “Key of safe number two.”
“What an idiot I am! I have brought the wrong key!”
He went up again, grumbling at his stupidity, opened the cupboard
where the keys were kept, and looked for the right one. Number
three was the one he wanted. And number three was not there.
George stood transfixed. He had custody of the keys. No other
person had the power of approaching the place they were guarded
in: except his brother. Had the Bank itself disappeared, George
Godolphin could not have been much more astonished than at the
disappearance of this key. Until this moment, this discovery of its
absence, he would have been ready to swear that there it was,
before all the judges in the land.
He tossed the keys here; he tossed them there; little heeding how
he misplaced them. George became convinced that the Fates were
dead against him, in spiriting away, just because he wanted it, this
particular key. That no one could have touched it except Thomas, he
knew: and why he should have done so, George could not imagine.
He could not imagine where it was, or could be, at the present
moment. Had Thomas required it to visit the safe, he was far too
exact, too methodical, not to return it to its place again.
A quarter of an hour given to hunting, to thinking—and the
thinking was not entirely agreeable thinking—and George gave it up
in despair.
“I must wait until to-morrow,” was his conclusion. “If Thomas has
carried it away with him, through forgetfulness, he will find it out

and replace it then.”
He was closing the cupboard door, when something arrested it on
its lower shelf, so that it would not close. Bringing the light inside he
found—the missing key. George himself must have dropped it there
on first opening the cupboard. With a suppressed shout of delight he
snatched it up. A shout of delight! Better that George Godolphin had
broken into a wail of lamentation! Another moment, and he was
going down the stairs to the strong-room, key in hand.
Safe number three, on the right, was unlocked without trouble
now. In that safe there were some tin boxes, on one of which was
inscribed “Lord Averil.” Selecting another and a smaller key from
those he held, George opened this.
It was full of papers. George looked them rapidly over with the
quick eye of one accustomed to the work, and drew forth one of
them. Rather a bulky parcel, some writing upon it. This he thrust
into his pocket, and began putting the rest in order. Had a mirror
been held before him at that moment, it would have reflected a face
utterly colourless. He returned to the office.
Enclosing the packet in a stout envelope, which he directed, he
went out, and dropped it into the post-office at the opposite corner
of Crosse Street. Very soon he was on his way to Lady Godolphin’s
Folly, bearing with him the small parcel sent by Mrs. Verrall—a
sufficient excuse for calling there, had George required an excuse.
Which he did not.
It was a light night; as it had been the previous night, though the
moon was not yet very high. He gained the turnstile at the end of
the Ash-tree Walk—where he had been startled by the apparition of
Thomas, and where Isaac Hastings had seen Charlotte Pain that
morning—and turned into the open way to the right. A few paces
more, and he struck into the narrow pathway which would lead him
through the grove of trees, leaving Ashlydyat and its approaches to
the left.
Did George Godolphin love the darkness, that he should choose
that way? Last night and again to-night he had preferred it. It was

most unusual for any one to approach the Folly by that obscure
path. A few paces round, and he would have skirted the thicket,
would have gone on to the Folly in the bright, open moonlight.
Possibly George scarcely noticed that he chose it: full of thought,
was he, just then.
He went along with his head down. What were his reflections?
Was he wishing that he could undo the deeds of the last hour—
replace in that tin case what he had taken from it? Was he wishing
that he could undo the deeds of the last few years—be again a man
without a cloud on his brow, a heavier cloud on his heart? It was too
late: he could recall neither the one nor the other. The deed was
already on its way to London; the years had rolled into the awful
Past, with its doings, bad and good, recorded on high.
What was that? George lifted his head and his ears. A murmur of
suppressed voices, angry voices, too, sounded near him, in one of
which George thought he recognized the tones of Charlotte Pain. He
went through to an intersecting path, so narrow that one person
could with difficulty walk down it, just as a scream rang out on the
night air.
Panting, scared, breathless, her face distorted with fear or
passion, as much as George could see of it in the shaded light, her
gauze dress torn by every tree with which it came in contact, flying
down the narrow pathway, came Charlotte Pain. And—unless George
Godolphin was strangely mistaken—some one else was flying in
equal terror in the opposite direction, as if they had just parted.
“Charlotte! What is it? Who has alarmed you?”
In the moment’s first impulse he caught hold of her to protect her;
in the second, he loosed his hold, and made after the other fugitive.
The impression upon George’s mind was, that some one, perhaps a
stranger, had met Charlotte, and frightened her with rude words.
But Charlotte was as swift as he. She flung her hands around
George, and held him there. Strong hands they always were: doubly
strong in that moment of agitation. George could not unclasp them:
unless he had used violence.

“Stay where you are! Stay where you are, for the love of Heaven!”
she gasped. “You must not go.”
“What is all this? What is the matter?” he asked in surprise.
She made no other answer. She clung to him with all her weight of
strength, her arms and hands straining with the effort, reiterating
wildly, “You must not go! you must not go!”
“Nay, I don’t care to go,” replied George: “it was for your sake I
was following. Be calm, Charlotte: there’s no necessity for this
agitation.”
She went on, down the narrow pathway, drawing him with her.
The broader path gained—though that also was but a narrow one—
she put her arm within his, and turned towards the house. George
could see her white frightened face better now, and all the tricks and
cosmetics invented could not hide its ghastliness; he felt her heaving
pulses; he heard her beating heart.
Bending down to her, he spoke with a soothing whisper. “Tell me
what it was that terrified you.”
She would not answer. She only pressed his arm with a tighter
pressure, lest he might break from her again in pursuit; she hurried
onwards with a quicker step. Skirting round the trees, which before
the house made a half circle, Charlotte came to the end, and then
darted rapidly across the lawn to the terrace and into the house by
one of the windows. He followed her.
Her first movement was to close the shutters and bar them: her
next to sit down on the nearest chair. Ill as she looked, George could
scarcely forbear a smile at her gauze dress: the bottom of its skirt
was in shreds.
“Will you let me get you something, Charlotte? Or ring for it?”
“I don’t want anything,” she answered. “I shall be all right directly.
How could you frighten me so?”
“I frighten you!” returned George. “It was not I who frightened
you.”

“Indeed it was. You and no one else. Did you not hear me
scream?”
“I did.”
“It was at you, rustling through the trees,” persisted Charlotte. “I
had gone out to see if the air would relieve this horrid headache,
which has been upon me since last night and won’t go away. I
strolled into the thicket, thinking all sorts of lonely things, never
suspecting that you or any one else could be near me. I wonder I
did not faint, as well as scream.”
“Charlotte, what nonsense! You were whispering angrily with
some one; some one who escaped in the opposite direction. Who
was it?”
“I saw no one; I heard no one. Neither was I whispering.”
He looked at her intently. That she was telling an untruth he
believed, for he felt positive that some second person had been
there. “Why did you stop me, then, when I would have gone in
pursuit?”
“It was your fault for attempting to leave me,” was Charlotte’s
answer. “I would not have remained alone for a house full of gold.”
“I suppose it is some secret. I think, whatever it may be,
Charlotte, you might trust me.” He spoke significantly, a stress on
the last word. Charlotte rose from her seat.
“So I would,” she said, “were there anything to confide. Just look
at me! My dress is ruined.”
“You should take it up if you go amidst clumsy trees, whose rough
trunks nearly meet.”
“I had it up—until you came,” returned Charlotte, jumping upon a
chair that she might survey it in one of the side glasses. “You
startled me so that I dropped it. I might have it joined, and a lace
flounce put upon it,” she mused. “It cost a great deal of money, did
this dress, I can tell you, Mr. George.”
She jumped off the chair again, and George produced the packet
confided to him by Mrs. Verrall.

“I promised her that you should have it to-night,” he said. “Hence
my unfortunate appearance here, which it seems has so startled
you.”
“Oh, that’s over now. When did you get back again?”
“By the seven o’clock train. I saw Verrall.”
“Well?”
“It’s not well. It’s ill. Do you know what I begin to suspect at
times?—That Verrall and every one else is playing me false. I am sick
of the world.”
“No, he is not, George. If I thought he were, I’d tell you so. I
would, on my sacred word of honour. It is not likely that he is. When
we are in a bilious mood, everything wears to us a jaundiced tinge.
You are in one to-night.”

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