Grace Murray Hopper Debugs the Future

Grace Murray Hopper loved puzzles more than anything. She grew up taking clocks apart to see how they worked. She put them back together, too. Every single time. When Grace grew up, she joined the United States Navy. It was 1944, and America needed brave, smart people. Grace was both. The Navy gave her a job working on a giant machine called a computer. The computer filled an entire room. It had thousands of tiny wires and switches. Grace thought it was the most wonderful puzzle she had ever seen. One afternoon, the big machine stopped working. Nobody knew why. Grace rolled up her sleeves and went to find out. She looked and looked. She checked every wire. She counted every switch. Then she found it. Tucked inside the machine was a tiny moth. A real bug! It had gotten stuck between two wires and made the computer stop. Grace carefully lifted the moth out with tweezers. She taped it into her notebook and wrote beside it: First actual case of bug being found. Everyone laughed a little. Then the machine hummed back to life. From that day on, fixing a broken computer was called debugging. Grace Hopper gave us that word. But Grace did not stop there. She kept working. She kept asking questions. She helped write the first computer languages, so that one day, people everywhere could use computers easily. Grace always said, The most damaging phrase in the language is we have always done it this way. She believed a new idea was worth trying. Because of Grace Murray Hopper, computers became a tool for every person in America. And somewhere tonight, a little puzzle-solver is looking at a clock and wondering how it works. Grace would smile at that.