Desk Set (1957)

Desk Set (1957) is a Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy movie about automation where Tracy, an engineer is brought in to automate the research department run by Bunny Watson (Hepburn.) There is a moment of interest to digital humanists when Tracy is showing off EMERAC:

Boss: Well there she is, EMERAC, the modern miracle …

Richard Sumner (Tracy): The purpose of this machine, of course, is to free the worker…

Bunny Watson (Hepburn): You can say that again…

Sumner: …to free the worker from the routine and repetitive tasks and liberate his time for more important work.

For example, you see all those books there … and the ones up there? Well, every fact in them has been fed into Emmy. What do you have there?

Operator: This is Hamlet

Boss: That’s Hamlet?

Operator: Yes the entire text.

Sumner: In code, of course… Now these little cards create electronic impulses which are accepted and retained by the machine so that in the future, if anyone calls up and wants a quotation from Hamlet the research worker types it into the machine here, Emmi goes to work, and the answer comes out here.

Boss: And it never makes a mistake.

Sumner: Well … Now that’s not entirely accurate. Emmy can make a mistake.

Bunny: Ha ha…

Sumner: But only if the human element makes the mistake first.

Boss: Tell me Bunny, has EMERAC been helping you any?

Bunny: Well frankly it hasn’t started to give yet. For the past two weeks we’ve been feeding it information. But I think you could safely say that it will provide more leisure for more people.

There is an image of EMERAC on Flickr.