Dr. Erna Schneider Hoover
Born: June 19, 1926, Irvington, New Jersey
Erna Schneider Hoover developed a computerized telephone switching system at Bell Labs. This was a computer-controlled system that forever changed how we make and receive calls. Her stored program control (SPC) software received a patent, the first ever patent for software. Hoover was described as an important pioneer for women in the field of computer technology.
When she was born her family lived in Orange, New Jersey. Her mother was a teacher, her father a dentist. Her younger brother died in childhood from polio. She was interested in science from an early age, and was motivated to believe that women could succeed as scientists after reading a biography of Marie Curie.
She graduated high school in 1944 and went on to attend Wellesley College, studying history. She graduated in 1948 with a bachelor’s degree with honors. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy and the foundations of mathematics from Yale in 1951. She went on to teach philosophy and logic at Swarthmore from 1951 to 1954, but never obtained tenure, perhaps because she was a married woman.
She met her future husband, Charles Wilson Hoover, while at Yale. They married in 1953 and had three daughters. The family moved to Summit, New Jersey in 1954, where Erna’s husband started working at Bell Laboratories. Erna joined her husband at Bell Labs as a technical associate.
At this time Bell Labs were working to develop an electronic switching system (ESS) for telephony, to process calls more efficiently, particularly during peak traffic times. Erna worked on the software that would control the switching using her knowledge of symbolic logic and feedback. The SPC she developed monitored the call volume and reduced the rate that calls were sent into the system, thus preventing overloads and suspension of service. It was for this work and its successors that she received her patent, she also received a promotion, becoming the first supervisor of a technical department at Bell Labs.
It’s due to the developments in electronically switched telephony that Erna Hoover innovations made possible that we can make calls anywhere in the world any time we want and from any place we are. We often do not think about how the technology we use works, but it was people like Erna Hoover who enable our modern convenience society.
In 1978 she was again promoted to head up her department, the first woman to reach that rank at Bell Labs. Her department worked on several military and commercial projects, and on Artificial Intelligence. She retired from Bell Labs in 1987.
In retirement she took a keen interest in promoting higher education, particularly of women. She was awarded an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, for her contributions to higher education in New Jersey, in 2020.
Although Erna Hoover, nee Schneider was born into a more privileged life than many of the women we have met, she did meet and crack the odd glass ceiling during her career. She is not well known outside the specialized field of communications that she once occupied, but her software algorithms are still the basis of the phone systems we use every day.