a group of boys who worked in the Octagon Room of the Royal Greenwich Observatory for Astronomer Royal, George Airy. Airy's computers, hired after 1835, could be as young as fifteen and they were working on a backlog of astronomical data. The way that Airy organized the Octagon Room with a manager, pre-printed computing forms and standardized methods of calculating and checking results (similar to the way the Nautical Almanac computers operated) would remain a standard for computing operations for the next 80 years. Women were increasingly involved in computing after 1865. Private companies hired them for computing and to manage office staffs. In the 1870s, the United States Signal Corps created a new way of organizing human computing to track weather patterns. This built on previous work from the US Navy and the Smithsonian meteorological project. The Signal Corps used a small computing staff that processed data that had to be collected quickly and finished in "intensive two-hour shifts". Each individual human computer was responsible for only part of the data. In the late nineteenth century Edward Charles Pickering organized the "Harvard Computers". The first woman to approach them, Anna Winlock, asked Harvard Observatory for a computing job in 1875. By 1880, all of the computers working at the Harvard Observatory were women. The standard computer pay started at twenty-five cents an hour. There would be such a huge demand to work there, that some women offered to work for the Harvard Computers for free. Many of the women astronomers from this era were computers with possibly the best-known being Florence Cushman, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Annie Jump Cannon, who worked with Pickering from 1888, 1893, and 1896 respectively. Cannon could classify stars at a rate of three per minute. Mina Fleming, one of the Harvard Computers, published The Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra in 1890. The catalogue organized stars by spectral lines. The catalogue continued to be expanded by the Harvard Computers and added new stars in successive volumes. Elizabeth Williams was involved in calculations in the search for a new planet, Pluto, at the Lowell Observatory. In 1893, Francis Galton created the Committee for Conducting Statistical Inquiries into the Measurable Characteristics of Plants and Animals which reported to the Royal Society. The committee used advanced techniques for scientific research and supported the work of several scientists. W.F. Raphael Weldon, the first scientist supported by the committee worked