Frances Bilas Spence
![Picture](/uploads/5/0/1/8/50182615/2166675_orig.jpg)
Early life and Education
Frances Bilas was born in Philadelphia in 1922 as the second of five sisters. While attending the Chestnut Hill College she majored in mathematics with a minor in physics and graduated in 1942. While there, she met Kathleen Antonelli, who later also became an ENIAC programmer. In 1947, she married Homer Spence, an Army electrical engineer from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds who had been assigned to the ENIAC project and later became head of the Computer Research Branch.
ENIAC Career
Spence along with other women were originally hired by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering , funded by the US Army, to create the ENIAC, which was needed to compute ballistics trajectories as part of a team of eighty women. Frances and her Chestnut Hill College classmate Kathleen Antonelli were part of a smaller team within the ENIAC team. In addition to their larger programming duties, they were also assigned to the operation of an analog computing machine known as a Differential Analyzer, which was used to calculate ballistics equations (something which all the women on the ENIAC team were proficient at doing by hand). When the War ended, both Frances and Kathleen continued working with the ENIAC and they collaborated with other leading mathematicians.
In 1997, Frances was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame,[7] along with the other original ENIAC programmers.
Frances Bilas was born in Philadelphia in 1922 as the second of five sisters. While attending the Chestnut Hill College she majored in mathematics with a minor in physics and graduated in 1942. While there, she met Kathleen Antonelli, who later also became an ENIAC programmer. In 1947, she married Homer Spence, an Army electrical engineer from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds who had been assigned to the ENIAC project and later became head of the Computer Research Branch.
ENIAC Career
Spence along with other women were originally hired by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering , funded by the US Army, to create the ENIAC, which was needed to compute ballistics trajectories as part of a team of eighty women. Frances and her Chestnut Hill College classmate Kathleen Antonelli were part of a smaller team within the ENIAC team. In addition to their larger programming duties, they were also assigned to the operation of an analog computing machine known as a Differential Analyzer, which was used to calculate ballistics equations (something which all the women on the ENIAC team were proficient at doing by hand). When the War ended, both Frances and Kathleen continued working with the ENIAC and they collaborated with other leading mathematicians.
In 1997, Frances was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame,[7] along with the other original ENIAC programmers.