Meltzer was born Marlyn Wescoff in Philadelphia and graduated from Temple University in 1942. She was hired by the Moore School of Engineering later that year to perform weather calculations, mainly because she knew how to operate an adding machine; in 1943, she was hired to perform calculations for ballisticstrajectories.]At the time this was accomplished by using manual desktop mechanical calculators. In 1945, she was selected to become one of the first group of ENIAC programmers.
ENIAC
ENIAC was a huge machine full of black panels and switches, containing 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short tons, occupied 167m2 and consumed 150 kW of electricity. Its huge power requirement led to a rumor that the lights across Philadelphia would dim every time it was switched on. ENIAC was unveiled to the public on February 14, 1946, their program captured the imagination of the press and made headlines across the country. Although mentioned in Woman of the ENIAC, at the time, little recognition was attributed to the women working on the computer. The ENIAC became a very important machine during this time. The male engineers that build the machine soon became famous. The woman who ran this machine soon disappeared from history. She resigned from the team in 1947 to get married before ENIAC was relocated to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. In 1997 Meltzer was inducted into the Women in Technology InternationalHall of Fame, along with the other original ENIAC programmers. This award was established in 1996 by WITI to recognize, honor, and promote the outstanding contributions women make to the scientific and technological communities that improve and evolve our society.
Volunteer work
Meltzer enjoyed volunteering at Shir Ami Library and Sunday school story hour. She also delivered Meals on Wheels for more than 10 years for the Greenwood House in Ewing, NJ. She was the treasurer of the Trenton/Lawrenceville chapter of Hadassah and an active member of Women for Greenwood House. During her last four years, she had knitted more than 500 chemotherapy hats for the Susan B. Komen Foundation in Philadelphia.
In 1997 she was inducted into the Women in TechnologyInternational Hall of Fame, along with the other original ENIAC programmers. Her work on ENIAC and at the University of Pennsylvania was later recognized in the 2010 documentary film. The ENIAC team is also the inspiration behind the award-winning 2013 documentary The Computers. This documentary, created by Kathy Kleiman and the ENIAC Programmers Project, combines actual footage of the ENIAC team from the 1940s with interviews with the female team members as they reflect on their time working together on the ENIAC. It is the first documentary of a series of three, and parts two and three will be entitled The Coders and The Future-Maker, respectively.
