Kathleen "Kay" Rita Mauchly Antonelli McNulty

1 of the 6 Women of ENIAC remembered as "Hidden Figures"

on the night of her birth during the Irish War of Independence her father was arrested as a suspected IRA member & bomber, he spent the next 2 years in Derry Jail & the family emigrated to the US in 1924 about a year after his release settling in Philadelphia

Irish was her 1st language & she recalled remembering prayers in Irish for the rest of her life

attended parochial schools & an all-girls high school & college

after college graduation was hired as a "human computer" to compute ballistics trajectories used for artillery firing tables at the Ballistic Research laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Grounds with a starting salary of $1,620 yearly

each gun required its own firing table which had approximately 1,800 trajectories & computing 1 trajectory required 30-40hours of calculation with a calculator

worked with differential analyser which cut the calculation time to 50 minutes for 1 trajectory, when using ENIAC could complete 1 trajectory in approximately 10 seconds but setting up the computer to run a new calculation could take 1-2 days

in the very beginning ENIAC program was so highly classified the programmers weren't allowed in the room with it & had to use blueprints to work out the programming

her team tested the feasibility of the H-Bomb

at ENIACs launch the women who programmed it were instructed to act as hpostesses & greet those around them, they received no recognition for their work until decades later

1948 she married John Mauchly (died 1980) the co-inventor of ENIAC, quit her job at Aberdeen & continued to work with hi on software for other hardware he developed

her parents, especially her mother, objected to the marriage

Married 2nd husband Severo Antonelli 1985 & he died 1996