Everyone in any given field likes to laugh at the elements that movies get wrong about their field. Surgeons scoff at surgery, cops sneer at the speed forensic analysis is completed, and technology folks laugh at the things that movie computers can do.
I giggle over the improbabilities along with everyone else, but secretly I find movie computers kind of endearing. So, I’m starting a series of blog posts about my favorite movie computers. And to inaugurate the series, I’d like to introduce you to my very favorite computer, EMERAC (Electronic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator) from the 1957 Twentieth Century-Fox movie “Desk Set.”
The movie, for those of you unfamiliar with it (and if you like old movies and haven’t watched it, you really should), stars Katharine Hepburn as Bunny Watson, the head of a television company research library. In the 21st century we have all the information we could want at our fingertips, but back in the day research departments provided the answer to the most random questions. Examples in this movie include the name of Santa’s reindeer (it’s Donder!) and the full text of the poem “The Song of Hiawatha.”
Along comes Spencer Tracy, Hepburn’s usual co-star, as Richard Sumner, an efficiency expert who has invented EMERAC. He brings EMERAC to the research library to answer easy questions and help free up the research staff to do more in-depth research (hey…this sounds familiar). The staff believes the computer is there to replace them, and hijinks ensue.
I’m not sure if the reason I love EMERAC so much is because I wanted to be the head of a research department when I was young (actually, I wanted to own my own research company!), or because of its crazy noises (bee-bop-boop) and flashing lights. Not to mention its sheer size and the way it goes insane and spits out cards everywhere, only to be fixed by a bobby pin.
The lights, size, noises, and output of EMERAC are all good for a chuckle, yet its anticipation of being able to type any question into a keyboard and get the answer immediately is eerie in its prescience. Sitting at my desk, on a laptop smaller than some actual reference books, I can type “Song of Hiawatha” into a search engine and before I blink, I get thousands of search results, including who wrote the poem, the full text of it, its main idea, where I can buy books that contain the poem, and a reference to a movie of the same name.
The movie ends happily, with the reference library staff NOT laid off, learning to work peacefully alongside good old “Emmy.” And Hepburn once again gets her man Tracy. By the shore of Hollywood, by the shining big-sea-water “I beheld, too, in that vision all the secrets of the future, of the distant days that shall be.”
Helen Meyers 