It was originally programmed around 1953 by James Cooley for John Tukey at John von Neumann's Institute for Advanced Study as a way to get "good smoothed statistical estimates of power spectra without requiring large Fourier transforms.
Prior to the advent of fast computers and the 1965 rediscovery of the fast Fourier transform, the large number of computations necessary for the discrete Fourier Transform motivated researchers to reduce the number of calculations required, resulting in the (now obsolete) Blackman–Tukey method based on the Wiener-Khinchin theorem.
[clarification needed] The method is fully described in Blackman and Tukey's 1958 journal publications republished as their 1959 book "The measurement of power spectra, from the point of view of communications engineering"[3] and is outlined by the following procedures: Autocorrelation makes the wave smoothed rather than averaging several waveforms.
[clarification needed] Computation gets faster if more data is correlated and if memory capacity of the system increases then overlap save sectioning technique would be applied.
[clarification needed] If the autocorrelation function in Blackman–Tukey is computed using FFT, then it will name fast correlation method for spectral estimation.