Doris Blumberg Polsky used to be a computer.

She was 18 years old and graduating with her twin sister Shirley from Girls’ High in May 1942. They were both bright and studious and looking for a next step, so naturally their principal suggested they join a secret ballistics research lab then forming at the University of Pennsylvania.

Called ‘human computers,’ the hundreds of women across the country who were tasked with complex ballistics mathematics — at ages as early as 18 — are part of another of the often forgotten stories of women affecting the World War II outcome for the United States. In this case, with math and science and technology in West Philadelphia.

The particularly celebrated group of women who were working at Penn — an effort that would lead to the famed development of the world’s first modern supercomputer — are also now the focus of a feature-length documentary from a Temple University professor.

“It’s a story of history and people and their stories that might be lost otherwise,” said director LeAnn Erickson.

After lecturing at Hive76 last month, tomorrow a FREE world premiere of Top Secret Rosies at the Franklin Institute kicks off a national film tour. Watch a preview below.

“It was always thought likely that the U.S. would have to get involved in the war, so were active with some planning, but, really, we were thrown so radically into the war, that our army had to mobilize quickly,” Erickson, 52, told Technically Philly. “Anywhere there were serious math and engineering programs, there was some kind of research or work happening with the army.

But in true Philadelphia fashion, what made Penn’s program so special was its location. Just 70 miles south was a military research facility and recruiting grounds in Aberdeen, MD. That facility had a differential analyzer, which was then the most advanced piece of computing technology, and the military had housed one of only a handful of other such devices at Penn’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

“This wasn’t a Penn program. This was a collaboration between Penn and the army,” Erickson said.

LeAnn Erickson

So, there weren’t many other places where dozens of factors could be integrated into complex ballistics tables to increase the accuracy of gunfire and other weapon use. While every spare man was mobilized abroad, these highly educated, math-orientated females were creating the charts that would dictate from what distance, at what speed and in what direction, say, a Howitzer should be fired from the soft sands of north Africa as opposed to firmer, trench warfare locations in the European theater.

“For a computer doing this by hand, with pencil and paper or perhaps with a desktop calculator, a single [tabulation] could take 40 hours, a full work week,” Erickson said.

In Rosies, Erickson tells the story of the women (and men) who were there, the work they did and how their research helped lead to the funding and development of the ENIAC, which, by most accounts, set into place the great digital revolution of the past half century.

Erickson, a former high school art teacher who went back to graduate school to study film and got into documentary work in her late 20s, found this story “by accident.”

In 2003, the Glenside native who grew up in the Midwest was interviewing the Blumberg twins for another documentary, called Neighbor Ladies. In 2004, Erickson started research and found no one had done much extensive work on finding the stories of the educated, math-oriented women whose role with technology, science and ballistics made the U.S. military the force that it became.

“I have a long history of personal interest in women’s history and World War II and in finding their lost stories,” Erickson said. “That’s what this is.”

Nick Zangara was 21-years-old in 2004 when a makeshift bomb exploded near his convoy in Tikrit, 90 miles northwest of Baghdad and a universe from his home in Northeast Philadelphia.

The George Washington High School graduate is one of at least 16 people from Philadelphia who have been killed in Middle Eastern military conflicts this decade, according to a new Google Earth layer called “Map the Fallen.”

“This Memorial Day I would like to share with you a personal project of mine that uses Google Earth to honor the more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan,” writes Sean Askay, the layer’s creator. “I have created a map for Google Earth that will connect you with each of their stories, you can see photos, learn about how they died, visit memorial Web sites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died.”

The layer, which made its national debut yesterday on CNN, is the four-year work of a geospatial content developer for the Google Earth Outreach team.

You must  have Google Earth 5.0 installed to view and download the project, which you can do here.

The layer creates a direct line from each service member’s hometown and his or her place of death. It works on a timeline system, showing each U.S. and coalition troop death chronologically, dating back to the first in Afghanistan on October 10, 2001. Users can search fallen service members by name, age, gender, hometown or location of death.

The 16 Philadelphians who have died range in age from 20 to 36 — Nick Zangara being among the youngest.

A Zangara Memorial Fund was created, though a listed e-mail was no longer functioning.

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

• The Inquirer reports on the retirement of Arthur Lendo, noted for taking tiny Rittenhouse-based Pierce Peirce College from regional “Oh, I didn’t even realize that was real college” to “if I heard of them it was because of their online education program.” Don’t give him too much credit, though. A Google search of “Pierce College” yields a California school first. ..Bah.

We get some Navy IT, the Flyers soar and three other tech stories you should read  including our most trafficked post of the week.

More:

• ReadWriteWeb gives a bit deeper analysis on Center City business metrics firm RJMetrics, which we reported open public business last week.
• The Inquirer reports blandly and insufficiently that the U.S. Navy has awarded a contract to set up and manage an IT equipment warehouse somewhere in Philadelphia. We’ll investigate.
• Paul Greenberg gives you too much information on his sports interests in the opening of a lengthy discussion of the succeeding promotions of the Philadelpia Flyers — including detailed use of the Web and tech.
  
• Perhaps the only thing worse than a Washington Post columnist writing a column in 2009 that begins with “I finally set up a Facebook account,” is that the Inquirer paid to actually put it in its “technology” section. Ew.
  

• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: RJMetrics mining business database information

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything if you spent the week trying to avoid your little sister’s college graduation, with Friday Tech Links.

There’s something about Lockheed Martin’s Space Day plans that reminds us of the 1983 geekcult classic WarGames.

Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, which has offices throughout the region, including Cherry Hill, and is usually embroiled in our ongoing coverage of scary regional military tech innovation (yes, we’re considering a regular category), is doing something for the kids.

The company plans to ooh-and-ahh middle-schoolers by showing off human-computer interaction concepts with Nintendo Wii remotes, according to a press release.

The demonstrations will take place on May 1 at Lockheed’s Advanced Technology Laboratories locations in New Jersey and Virginia in celebration of the company’s international Space Day, its effort to scout K-12 geeks globally.

“Shall we play a game?”

Engineers will pair Wiimote controllers with Tangible User Interface applications, and wax poetic about interface interaction by speech, gestures and intuition.

The company will also be showing off computer networking, engineering principals, and robotics—yawn. And a small rocket will be launched—rawr.

In attendance will be employee children and local students from Carusi Middle School in Cherry Hill, Howard M. Phifer Middle School in Pennsauken and Bear Tavern Science Fair winners in Titusville.

C’mon Lockheed, let’s not kid ourselves. We know this is less about the kids as it is about getting a Wii console in the company break room. We’re planning the same here at Technically Philly—soon as we get an office.

Two regional subsidiaries of Lockheed Martin, Bethesda, Maryland’s friendly neighborhood military logistics multinational corporation, got good news this week.

Yes, it’s another round of scary regional military tech innovation.

Their Newton-based space systems arm was part of the design and construction of a new global-positioning satellite that was rocket-launched into space on Tuesday, according to a company press release.

That came a day after the company’s maritime systems and sensors firm won a $10.7 million contract from the U.S. Navy, according to another presser.

Their GPS Block IIR-20(M) satellite took to the skies from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It was a joint project with the U.S. Air Force under a $6 million contract.� The launch was the seventh in a line of eight IIR satellites that the company’s team modernized for the Global Positioning Systems Wing, Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base.

Their maritime division’s Navy contract is to provide training to Japanese and Norwegian crews whose ships are equipped with the Aegis Weapon System, which Lockheed develops in beautiful Moorestown, N.J.

The Japanese crews will be trained in Moorestown or at the Dahlgren, Va., home of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, which awarded the contract. Lockheed will handle the Norwegian crews in Norway or Dahlgren.

The training is expecting to complete the training by March 2012.

Yeah, Canada is screwed.

The order has a one-year base value of $2.3 million, followed by two one-year options for a total estimated value of $7.1 million. It is a follow-up to a contract Unisys has held since 1999, according to a company press release.

Unisys will handle unclassified networks, which may or may not include e-mail invitations to tea parties, in addition to classified networks, which may or may not include e-mail invitations to secret tea parties.

The networks will include video teleconferencing systems and the administration of IT hardware to help make the agency more secure (read: scary) and uninterrupted (read: unstoppable). The Montgomery County company will also offer help-desk services, application deveopment and graphics design support (“See, now it looks like Dave’s head is on Mary’s body”).

On the friendlier tech front of fellow often military-contracted giant, Lockheed Martin, which is based in Maryland but has operations in King of Prussia, it will fund $400,000 in research and development “Smart grid” projects at Penn State, aiming at increasing electricity and energy performance, according to its own company press release.