The First Bugs

Let’s talk about the first bugs today.

You’re probably already thinking about two different meanings for the word bug: one is all about six-legged critters (possibly also eight-legged, depending on how you define it), and the other is about some kind of error in a computer process or program.

Note: you might also say you’ve caught a bug if you’re sick, although I think you hear this a lot less nowadays than when I was a kid.

There’s a story surrounding the way the phrase came about in computing, and it involves an absolute legend in the field of programming.

Grace Hopper had the type of mind the Navy was most interested in, and she joined the naval reserves at the start of World War II. Her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale, coupled with her intense patriotism, made Hopper ideal for complex computational work that would prove crucial to the war effort.

During the war, there was a desperate need for computers—the people who did the calculating for things like artillery—and thousands of women, many of whom were very highly skilled mathematicians were employed by the Navy to do all this number crunching. At some point very early in the war, the Navy realized that it needed even more computing power, and this led to the Harvard Mark I computer.

This computer was electromechanical in nature, meaning physical gears turned and things moved around whenever a calculation is done. This technology borrowed from the likes of Charles Babbage’s designs from a hundred years earlier, and it differs from modern computers that send the signal by way of an electric signal.

This meant that there was an awful lot of maintenance needed on the Mark I! It was always breaking down and failing to perform the calculations needed because of all those moving parts. Hopper’s persistence in solving problems, along with her very creative mind, made her the perfect person to program the Mark I (and its descendants).

There’s a story about her that goes like this: In September of 1945, the Mark II computer malfunctioned. Hopper and her team found a moth stuck in one of the relays—one of those mechanical parts of the electromechanical Mark II.

Hopper taped the moth to her logbook, and wryly noted, “First actual case of bug being found." Here’s that actual page, which is currently kept in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History:

photo: Bernard Goldbach

Well, there you go! It’s really cool that the Smithsonian has the first ever use of the word “bug.”

You’re feeling a little skeptical right now, and you’re right to feel that way. In addition to her powerful analytical mind, Hopper was also graced with a fantastic sense of humor. When she discovered that her team had found a moth inside of the machine, she made a little joke about this, based on an existing term: a bug.

I’m not quite sure how this story became an apocryphal story about the origin of the term “bug”, but the truth is that the term predated Hopper’s Mark II incident by nearly a century, and possibly much more. Thomas Edison famously used the word “bug” to refer to technical issues with his inventions, and the word was in use during the early 20th century in the same manner.

The first actual bug—insect, I mean—was some time earlier than 400 million years ago.

How do I know that? We have a fossil of a bug from 400 million years ago. In some ways, we know more about how actual bugs (insects and arachnids) came to be than we know about the word “bug” to mean a technical issue.

This is the most interesting aspect of the story to me: we can often be surprised with what we know about the past and what we don’t. We have to take things as they come in, and base our understanding of them on evidence, not retold apocryphal stories. This can be really tricky, since we humans are susceptible to a good story, and we’ll retell it even if it’s wrong.

Do you have a favorite fake story like this, something that keeps getting retold until a majority of folks think it’s real? Tell me in the comments!